Humanism and Superhumanism: A Deep Analysis

Olaf Stapledon’s lecture to the South Place Ethical Society, read against everything he wrote.

What this document is. An analytical essay by the reconstruction project’s editors — not a text by Stapledon. Quotations are taken from the manuscript’s verified consensus transcription (lectures/transcriptions_v2/consensus_v2/) and from his published works as held in corpus/; interpretive claims beyond the quoted evidence are the editors’ own and are hedged as such. Third edition, July 2026 (see the endnotes and the project ERRATA.md).

1. The document and its occasion

The manuscript is item 33 in the Stapledon archive (Liverpool University Library, catalogue reference OS/F11/4; the last sheet bears the circular library stamp with “STAP.” at its centre and “F11/4” added by hand): thirty-four sheets of pencil notes, with red-pencil staging annotations, prepared for a lecture titled “Humanism and Superhumanism.” The synopsis sheet carries the red annotation “South Place, 29·12·3[4]” — the South Place Ethical Society, London, by its own account the oldest surviving freethought community in the world (from 1929 housed at Conway Hall). The final digit of the year is ambiguous in the handwriting (the transcription models split between 34 and 36), but the archive tradition and the lecture’s content — Communism and Fascism discussed as live rival creeds, no mention of war — fit the mid-1930s; and the University of Liverpool’s own IIIF catalogue metadata for the digitized manuscript reads the year the same way, dating the item “D:29 M:12 Y:1934”. The lecture itself, however, was delivered the following day, Sunday 30 December 1934. Conway Hall’s catalogue record for the contemporary published abstract of the lecture — Monthly Record (the journal of the South Place Ethical Society), Vol. 40 No. 2, February 1935, pp. 3–4 — carries the note “Lecture to the Society, December 30th 1934”; and the calendar corroborates it: the 29th was a Saturday, the 30th a Sunday, and the South Place discourses were the Society’s famous Sunday lectures. The red 29·12·34 is Stapledon’s own inscription — presumably the date on which he dated or finished the notes, the day before he stood up with them.

The Monthly Record entry is the lecture’s newly identified contemporary witness — or rather, the pointer to one: Conway Hall’s catalogue record identifies a contemporary published abstract of the lecture (Monthly Record, Vol. 40 No. 2, February 1935, pp. 3–4), where the manuscript preserves only what he planned to say. The abstract itself has not yet been acquired; what we hold is the catalogue’s own four-sentence summary of it, which reads: “Humanism refers only to mankind, but superhumanism to forces greater than man. The superhumanistic outlook can have an inspirational effect. It possesses a religious character, though its object of worship may not necessarily be a deity. It is not to be identified with traditional religions, but it does have the same kind of intellectually and morally demanding outlook which traditional religion has shown.” (Conway Hall Ethical Society catalogue record, standard no. J140.22.) Even at this remove — a modern cataloguer’s summary of a contemporary abstract — it already suggests that the delivered lecture kept the notes’ load-bearing structure: superhumanism defined by orientation to “forces greater than man” rather than by doctrine (§2.1), and the religious character whose “object of worship may not necessarily be a deity” — the doctrine-free, practice-oriented worship the notes defend throughout. Confirmation must wait on the abstract itself, which is being requested from Conway Hall.

One negative finding now frames the whole question of witnesses. Robert Crossley’s Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future (Syracuse University Press, 1994) — the standard scholarly biography, built on the family papers and the Liverpool archive, acquired from the owner’s page photographs and read in full for this project in August 2026 — never mentions this lecture, the title “Humanism and Superhumanism,” or any South Place engagement in December 1934; its index has no South Place entry at all (a negative established by targeted search of text, endnotes, bibliography and index — with the OCR-defective pages, including index p. 467, re-read from the raw photographs). Nor is the silence an artifact of compression, for the lecture falls into a demonstrable documentary gap in the biography’s own apparatus: between a letter to Aage Marcus of 22 November 1934 and a letter to Naomi Mitchison of 4 January 1935, Crossley cites nothing from Stapledon’s hand except the BBC broadcast to the country’s Unemployed Clubs (“he spoke over the BBC at 11 AM, 3 Dec. 1934” — four weeks before South Place; a “partially disintegrated recording” of it, rescued by the family from the BBC archives, “contains the only known transcription of Olaf’s voice,” Crossley notes). The biography does document the milieu the manuscript implies — South Place’s hall as a standing platform (“Anyone happening into Conway Hall in London’s Red Lion Square, where Olaf often spoke on politics or ethics or religion”), a second, previously unnoticed South Place lecture (“he and Agnes shared the platform at Conway Hall” on 7 April 1946, Agnes reading Shakespeare and Austen, “and Olaf followed with a lecture on ‘Personal Relations in the Family’”, printed in the Society’s Monthly Record that May — “The lecture was given 7 Apr.”), and even a family prehistory for the lecture’s subject: Stapledon’s father and Albert Crompton, the man behind his Blue Funnel appointment, “had known each other for nearly twenty years as members of the Positivist Church of Humanity in Liverpool” — organized humanism, in its Comtean form, as a household inheritance. But of the 30 December 1934 evening itself the standard life knows nothing. The manuscript, the Conway Hall catalogue record, and the pending Monthly Record abstract remain its only known witnesses, and — so far as we can determine — the present reconstruction is the lecture’s first scholarly treatment.

The audience matters enormously. South Place was the cathedral of English secular humanism. Stapledon walked into the home crowd of organized Humanism and told them, gently but firmly, that humanism is not enough. The whole rhetorical architecture of the notes — stating the humanist’s case “as strongly as possible” before answering it — is calibrated, it would seem, to that room; a reading corroborated when he brought the same architecture back to the same society in 1946 (§3.8). The biography adds the speaker’s own platform history, and it frames the evening from both ends. His original platform was dialogic: in his earliest WEA seasons (1911–12) what he prized was not the lecture but the argument after it — “It is the subsequent discussion that is so fascinating. I can’t tell you how weighty their remarks are (nor how idiotic at times),” he reported of an early talk, on (of all subjects) Carlyle’s “Hero Worship,” to “forty-two Birkenhead workers.” And by December 1934 that platform life had already split in two: after Last and First Men’s success he found himself “addressing conservative audiences who wouldn’t have dreamed of inviting a socialist WEA tutor,” and he “reduced his WEA classes to one per term to make room for other paid talks and to give himself time to write.” The South Place evening belongs to the new ecology — the famous author’s engagement at a metropolitan society, not the tutor’s class — but the notes’ patient stating-of-the-opponent’s-case-first is the old classroom manner carried onto the new platform. And the room itself can now be described in the movement’s own voice, for Gustav Spiller’s The Ethical Movement in Great Britain — the organized movement’s documentary history of itself, printed in the lecture’s own year (now held; §4 gives its account of the movement’s internal war) — shows South Place as the one boom spot of a shrinking movement (of “some 74 Ethical Societies” ever started, “At present there are 10 Ethical centres in existence”): a society reporting “nearly 600 in all” in the Conway Hall it had opened in 1929, where “the new home of the Society hums with activity”; hymn-singing, but the congregation asked to “refrain from applause on Sunday mornings”; its discussion circle run “under the joint auspices of the Rationalist Press Association and the Society.” The platform had kept no minister since Conway’s second term ended in 1897: by 1934 it was worked by four rotating “official lecturers” — Delisle Burns, Hobson, Ratcliffe, Robertson — while “nonofficial lecturers occupy the platform at frequent intervals,” the slot the visiting author filled; and its anniversary series had seated Russell (1922), Haldane (1928) and Julian Huxley (1930) on the lecture’s own themes in the preceding decade.

The synopsis sheet also records two titles with page numbers: “The Tyger” (p. 275) and “Ozymandias” (p. 214) — evidently planned readings, from some anthology (the sheet gives only titles and page numbers; their intended stations in the delivery are unrecorded). What he meant them to do in the room can only be guessed, but the natural guess is that each leans against a complacency the lecture opposes. The Tyger is the Mysterium Tremendum — Rudolf Otto’s name for the dreadful, beautiful, nonhuman Other (“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”), the “one appropriate expression” he found for the object of religious awe — against the humanist’s “nothing more than man.” Ozymandias is the vanity of purely human glory — the colossal wreck of the man-centered view, boundless and bare — against man-worship itself.

The notes are speaking notes, not an essay: heavily abbreviated (he writes “θ” or “ð” for “the,” “∴” for “therefore,” “∵” for “because,” “&”), indented into an outline hierarchy that encodes the subordination of ideas, underlined once for emphasis and twice for heavy vocal stress, with red pencil for the cover’s staging (the item number and title, the venue and date) and a later graphite pass for working marginalia and delivery cues (the boxed “Dwell on this”). Several sheets are section dividers with a single line — sheets he could see at a glance mid-performance. The manuscript, in other words, preserves the choreography of the lecture, not just its content. This is why a transcription that preserves indentation, underlining, and marginalia matters: the formatting is meaning.

2. The argument, movement by movement

The synopsis gives his own map: Definitions (p. 1) → What Humanism involves: lowbrow (3), highbrow (6) → Defence against Superhumanism (13) → Superhumanism (17).

2.1 Definitions (sheets 2–3)

He opens with a disarming confession: “My claim to speak: dissatisfaction with both.” He is neither a contented humanist nor a confident religionist — a positioning he maintained his whole life, as much at odds with orthodox Christianity as with settled atheism.

Humanism he defines from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, then sharpens into two claims:

1. nothing less than man is worthy of devotion;
2. nothing more than man is knowable by men.

Therefore all service, loyalty, praise and worship are due to “the awakening spirit of man.” (Beside the definition he pencils, diagonally, a rejected alternative wording — “or worshipful” — then strikes it out: even at the level of word-choice we can watch him tuning the definition.) Service of humanity means helping to fulfil the capacities of men — a formula lifted directly from his own philosophical system (see §3.2).

Superhumanism — his term (possibly his coinage; no earlier use is known to us, but priority is not established — and the word never occurs anywhere in Crossley’s standard biography, read in full for this project, which records no coinage or usage evidence either way) — is not theism. It is the attitude that humanism is not enough: the positive side of humanism is “sound and essential,” but “the denial of the Superhuman is an error.” Its starting point is either a feeling that man is not enough (“a vague dissatisfaction”; the margin adds, diagonally, “yearning”) or “some positive experience of worship of a nonhuman Other,” which may be conceived as “gods, Fate, God, Nature, a Principle of Order, the Whole etc.” Crucially: doctrinal elaboration is not essential to superhumanism — though “almost inevitable, because the Object of devotion is excessively obscure (from an intellectual point of view, even if vivid in experience).” And superhumanism must issue in practice: “not merely a passive recognition of ‘God’” but “a regulative principle, ‘making a difference to life, to conduct.’”

This definition is the lecture’s load-bearing wall. Everything he defends later is this minimal, doctrine-free, practice-oriented worship — and everything he concedes to the humanist critic is aimed at doctrinal religion, which he is happy to sacrifice.

2.2 Lowbrow humanism (sheets 4–6)

The form humanism takes “depends on the particular Humanist’s mental type.” Lowbrow (he later softens it, in a paler turquoise pencil, to “naive”) humanism starts from the felt sense of obligation toward fellow men and aims to fulfil men’s actual felt needs — “to take men at their face-value… and give them a happy life.” He identifies it with Utilitarianism: the greatest happiness of the greatest number, where happiness means pleasant hours; and since the greatest number are average folk, stress falls on “safety, food, comfort, free movement & amusements.” Its failure: “no impulsion toward difficult living” — no suggestion that men should rise above their actual selves to “realise a finer potentiality.” He invokes Bentham’s notorious dictum: “push-pin is as good as poetry — if it feels as good.”

The dictum’s pedigree, with both of its texts now held, is worth a moment’s precision. Bentham’s actual sentences, in The Rationale of Reward (1825), are: “Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either.” The quotable aphorism — “quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry” — is Mill’s paraphrase, from his 1838 essay “Bentham” (“He says somewhere in his works that…”). Stapledon’s version splices the two: Mill’s cadence, with Bentham’s proviso compressed into “if it feels as good” — the shape one would expect of a tag absorbed through Mill’s essay rather than from the treatise. Is the use fair? To the doctrine, yes — the hedonic equivalence is exactly what Bentham asserts, and “prejudice apart” even anticipates the lecture’s “if it feels as good.” To the man, only half: Bentham’s grounds continue past the equivalence into an egalitarian point the notes independently reproduce (“Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few” — the sheets’ “the greatest number are average folk”), and then into a charge the lecture has no use for, that “between poetry and truth there is a natural opposition… the poet always stands in need of something false.” Mill’s own gloss is that the sentence was “only a paradoxical way of saying what he would equally have said of the things he most valued and admired.” More telling than the tag itself: the classic statement of this movement’s whole indictment — “no impulsion toward difficult living” — is Mill’s 1838 verdict on Bentham, almost clause for clause. “Man is never recognised by him as a being capable of pursuing spiritual perfection as an end, of desiring for its own sake the conformity of his own character to his standard of excellence”; self-education, “the human being’s training of himself, of his affections and will,” is “a blank in Bentham’s system.” Stapledon’s lowbrow/highbrow architecture walks in that essay’s footsteps — whether at first or second hand the notes cannot show.

The case of Communism gets careful, notably even-handed treatment for 1934: proletarian communists are mostly naive humanists (their goal, the fulfilment of simple needs — an attitude “natural to the wage-slave” with unfulfilled material needs); the communist intelligentsia “tend to highbrow humanism, but shame-facedly”; and communist theory itself “seems to allow” two stages — dictatorship for reorganization, then a “Triumphant Communism” that “opens up new capacities, therefore full humanism.” He takes Marxism seriously as a rival creed — in the notes’ own taxonomy, a naive humanism with a built-in path to full humanism.

An important note (sheet 6) grounds the whole edifice: the sense of obligation toward others is intuitive — “simply felt, and felt as obligation — ‘I ought’” — not derivable from self-regard. Values bottom out in intuition. This is the ethics of A Modern Theory of Ethics compressed to three lines, and it sets up a crucial symmetry: if the humanist’s values rest on unprovable intuition, the superhumanist’s worship-intuition cannot be dismissed merely for being unprovable. (It is also a position Bentham had mocked by name — the man who “has something made on purpose to tell him what is right and what is wrong, calling it his ‘moral sense’,” and then goes “to work comfortably”; Mill’s essay reprints the whole tirade. Sheet 6 stakes the lecture on the move Bentham thought self-evidently vacuous, and stakes it with open eyes: the sanction is “simply felt,” and no more is claimed for it.)

2.3 Highbrow humanism (sheets 7–11)

Highbrow humanism accepts the lowbrow kind “as a sine qua non, but goes further.” Its goal is the fulfilling of human capacity — both felt needs and dormant capacities “for more difficult living.” It recognizes “a precious potentiality in man”: pleasures are not all of equal worth. The goal is the development of persons toward “more complete personality” — the development of conscious activity, of knowing, feeling, striving (his marginal note: “each involves the other” — and, boxed in graphite, “Dwell on this”).

He then unfolds each term: knowing means cognizing objects of every kind “as truly, as comprehensively, as dispassionately as possible” — the sensible world, scientific concepts, human personalities, social enterprise, art, the objects of religious consciousness. Feeling means emotional reactions becoming “more appropriate to objects” (appropriateness, he notes in the margin, is itself intuited). Striving means subordinating lesser to greater ends, “emancipation from the obsession of the familiar, easy, primitive impulse for the sake of the new, more difficult, & more developed.” His marginal gloss compresses it: “Advance = finer adjustment to reality.” The sanction for all this is again intuitive — “vision of the worthwhileness of these activities”; they “need no demonstration.”

Sheet 9’s analogy (deck) is characteristic of his teaching manner: a starving man craves food but may lack strength to seek it; a mentally starving man sees the humanistic goal as good “if he has it in him to apprehend it” — but may lack resolution, “or be sidetracked by easier goods.” Value-blindness, for Stapledon, is a failure of capacity or nerve, not of argument.

Then the hard political question (sheets 9–11): Aristocracy or Democracy? Equal opportunity for all even at low attainment, or highest attainment for a few even on the backs of slaves? Is the goal the fulfilment of all particular individuals, or “the achievement of a form of mind by means of individuals”? He runs four hypothetical worlds:

1. a world of mediocre beings exercising mediocre powers fully — condemned as a failure;
2. a world of abject slaves and a few splendidly fulfilled — condemned as violating human unity and the sense of obligation;
3. a brotherhood of equal supermen — impossible, because capacities vary in rank;
4. a hierarchical world where many subordinates fulfil their powers and a few attain the heights — “does not violate social obligation, yet does justice to the ideal.”

(Readers of Last and First Men will recognize these as thumbnail sketches of whole civilizations from the novel; readers of the 1929 Ethics will recognize the shape of its chapter XII. The mitigation — that mechanization “might enable all to attain fulness, each up to the limit of his capacity” — is the lecture’s own, on sheet 10; the 1929 book has no such softening, and is in fact harsher: see §3.2 and §3.11.)

The upshot (sheet 11) is a four-point creed of the “thorough-going humanist,” ending in the lecture’s first radical step (sheet 11): when we are most vital, most awakened, “we are ready to be sacrificed for the humanistic ideal.” Not sacrificed for each other’s happiness merely — that he distinguishes carefully (“I accept this out of comradeship, I accept the other out of devotion”) — but for the Ideal: “meaningless for all to ‘die’ for one another; but all might have to ‘die’ for the Ideal.” The margin fences the flight with a condition the celebration needs: “Yet: none may sacrifice another against his will.” The humanist ideal itself, taken seriously, already demands a self-transcendence that points beyond man as he is. The door to superhumanism is opened from the inside of humanism.

2.4 The sceptical interlude (sheet 12)

Before the main clash he pauses to let the sceptic question both parties: what justifies the sense of obligation at all? “Is it not sheer prejudice? Why not eat drink & be merry?” Psychoanalysis “explains away” high-flown intuitions by finding their “primitive unconscious sources” — worship of the Virgin from infantile sexual and filial craving, worship of a personal God from the infantile need of a Father, and, by the same token, the humanistic ideal itself from “infantile conditioning, merely.”

His answer, as the notes give it (sheet 12), has four parts: (1) psychoanalysis is “very salutary & enlightening & should make us sceptical”; (2) but its principles are vague and “its method can be turned against itself” (the analyst’s trust in his own theory being equally reducible to, e.g., “revulsion against parental sanctity”); (3) reduction to primitive motives is an “illicit abstraction”; (4) there is a qualitative difference between infantile craving and the recognition of the human ideal. In present-day terms: a genetic explanation of a belief does not by itself settle the belief’s validity. The result matters to the lecture twice over — it defends the humanist against the cynic here, and it will be available to the superhumanist later, when the humanist deploys the same Freudian argument against worship (§2.5). Whether that placement was tactical cannot be read off the manuscript; what the notes show is the parallel itself.

A diagonal note in the margin compresses the argument to a choice: “Choose — between ψ.a. & humanism” (sheet 12, margin; the cramped glyph is marked disputed in the transcription — “ψ.a.” or “P.A.”, psychoanalysis either way). Taken as a criterion of validity, the reduction applies to the humanist’s own ideal as much as to the superhumanist’s worship; a humanist who keeps his ideal has therefore already declined to treat origin as settling validity — which is the only concession the later argument needs. It is worth being precise about the move’s limits, which the notes respect: it blunts the genetic argument as a general solvent, but it does not show that any particular intuition — the humanist’s or the superhumanist’s — is veridical. That question is left, deliberately, to direct inspection.

With The Future of an Illusion now held (in Strachey’s translation), the opponent can be given his own voice — and the duel proves closer-fought than the notes’ four-point summary lets on. Of the texts we hold, this book is the closest comparator, and possibly the immediate source — but the identification should be stated at its true strength: sheet 12 names only “psycho-analysis,” never Freud; its opening example, worship of the Virgin from “infantile sexual & filial craving,” appears nowhere in The Future of an Illusion; and when Philosophy and Living cites Freud by title five years later, the works named are The Interpretation of Dreams, Totem and Taboo and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, not this book. What can be said is that the derivations the sheet reproduces are this book’s: religious ideas “are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind,” powered by “the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood” and the consequent need “to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one.” Even the sheet’s most aggressive move — extending the reduction to “the Humanistic ideal” itself — is one the book makes on its own behalf: “may not other cultural assets of which we hold a high opinion and by which we let our lives be ruled be of a similar nature? Must not the assumptions that determine our political regulations be called illusions as well?” But Freud is more careful than the humanist the notes arm with his argument. He concedes the genetic point’s logical limit himself — “An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error,” an illusion being defined by wish-derivation, not by falsity; and, flatly: “To assess the truth-value of religious doctrines does not lie within the scope of the present enquiry” — which is sheet 12’s point (4), granted in advance. He even anticipates the tu quoque of point (2), and answers it not by denying the charge but by conceding it and drawing a different line: “perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction… my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction. They have not the character of a delusion” — corrigibility, an answer the notes never engage, and a real one: Freud does not deny that his hopes may be wishes, he claims only to hold them correctably, and nothing in sheet 12’s four points meets that reply. Where the book actually stakes its claim is on suspicion rather than refutation — believers’ doctrines discredited because “it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be” — and on the future: “Our god Λόγος is perhaps not a very almighty one”; “science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion.” Against that actual position, sheet 12’s parity-move stands but shrinks: suspicion of what we are “bound to wish” is not disproof, and the humanist who keeps his ideal has already declined to treat origin as verdict — yet the flat “explains away” the notes attack is cruder than what the book says. And one convergence deserves the record, because it cuts oddly across the whole evening. Freud rules that the bare “sense of man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe” is not yet religion — the essence lies in “the next step after it, the reaction to it which seeks a remedy”; the man who “humbly acquiesces in the small part which human beings play in the great world” is “on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word.” A worship that forbids itself the remedy — sheet 28’s “we must outgrow the craving for security & the desire to have salvation” — renounces the very wish that powers Freud’s illusion-machine; on the book’s own definition it is not an illusion but an irreligion. Freud would have called the salute irreligious in the truest sense; Stapledon might not have minded the adjective, having chosen his own noun (“agnostic piety”). The residual dispute — whether a wish-free reverence is really wish-free, or only better disguised — no text on either side settles; it deserves to stand as this section’s live question, and it points at this analysis as much as at the lecture: a wish for austere submission may itself be wish-laden.

2.5 The humanist’s case against superhumanism (sheets 14, 16–20)

Having established that the humanistic ideal is necessary (“in spite of all critics we cannot but accept it… all other goals are either incomplete (e.g. the naive goal) or positively false (e.g. national power)”), he pivots: necessary, but not enough — “we must orientate ourselves to Something beyond Man, even beyond human perfection.”

But first he states the opposing case at full strength — the notes devote five sheets to it (sheets 16–20). The humanist’s indictment:

• Superhumanism is a dangerous drug — “habit-forming; it gets hold of you; makes all else seem worthless, insipid; incapacitates one for useful life; undermines the intellect by blurring all concepts & by giving a bias to all reasoning.”
• Its appeal is to the infantile in us — “the desire for a fairy-land universe where all wishes are fulfilled, glamourously, mysteriously, unintelligibly”; its seductive experiences “mere hallucinations due to unconscious cravings for safety, peace, omnipotence… the supreme flight from reality.”
• The historical record of superhuman religions — monastic withdrawal from the battle of life, priestly domination (“a class privileged to ‘know’ & to keep others from knowing”), tyrannizing by hellfire, temples instead of bread, resistance to every advance, “orgies of persecution,” religious wars.
• The argument from the limitations of the human mind — man’s intellect is “a practical instrument formed by natural selection for the struggle for existence, not suited to metaphysics”: “a spear serviceable for hunting quarry is futile when thrown at the moon.” (In the margin he adds the counter-seed: “wings / not for flying” — he first wrote “originally” and struck it — evolution repurposes; the seed flowers at sheet 27’s “progressive release of potentiality,” §2.6(c).)
• The argument from world-confusion — the most 1930s moment in the lecture: “even if superhumanism were right, in some sense, yet today — all hands to the pumps. Civilization is falling to pieces… In times of crisis, superhumanism is pernicious; it distracts from the urgent task.” He gives the Communist form of the argument — superhumanism as “capitalist dope calculated to sidetrack the proletariat,” Fascism as “a new version of it (a mystical Race deity)” — and, typically, half-concedes it: “I should say: not calculated, but it does have the effect desired, does distract, e.g. Roman Catholic influence.”

2.6 The defence of superhumanism (sheets 21–32) — the lecture’s heart

He begins with total candour: “Some of these arguments strike home with great force… humanism is a clear serene light to guide us; superhumanism a will-o’-the-wisp leading us over a precipice.” And then the hinge of the whole evening: “Yet Humanism is not enough — for me.” He underlines his temperamental alliance with the critics — “my sympathy is entirely with the humanist; I crave sanity, reasonableness, precision, rationality, science, practical bearing” — and admits that a clear answer to “why demand more?” is impossible, “though a clear answer is desperately needed. This is the most difficult of all questions; stretches mind to its limits.”

His reasons, “as clear as I can get it,” come in four registers — felt lack, felt acquaintance, rational considerations, pragmatic effects. This quadruple structure is the skeleton of the lecture’s second half.

(a) Felt insufficiency of humanism. Developed humanism satisfies in so far as it is implicitly superhumanist — i.e., in so far as it sets man a goal “which is good intrinsically, independently of opinion.” But even the best humanism “turns mankind into a mutual improvement and admiration society; its goal no better than self-improvement — cf. record-breaking, or learning fresh accomplishments.” The line he marks with a marginal X (sheet 22): “Humanism does not really make the best of Man, because it leaves out his true function.” What that function is, the notes defer to the close — where it returns as man’s office of worship (§2.6(d)).

(b) Felt acquaintance with a positive Something. This is his description of the experience of worship, and the notes here are unusually careful. The experience is “indescribable save by emotive words, which indicate the special emotion (the appropriate emotion) but do not describe the thing.” He names the risk of esotericism out loud: “those who already know will understand, others not — (how dangerous to say this).” Then the naming: a sense of “the numinous, the holy” — the vocabulary is Rudolf Otto’s (The Idea of the Holy), though the notes never cite him — “mystery, majesty, formidableness, horror, weirdness, eerie, exquisiteness, sweetness, excellence, beauty” — in objective existence. It can be found “in every kind of object”: pure sensation, perceptual objects small and great, persons, lives, dramas, introspected mental activity, personal relations — “love, hate,” with “copulation” a later graphite insertion — communities, the World Community, History, Evolution, atoms, stars, mathematical principles, art.

Normally things seem “just themselves — good, bad, indifferent… in relation to our needs” (the ellipsis passes over “beautiful & ugly, etc”). “But sometimes they strike us differently: they come alive — or we come alive, awake — and see them better, realize them, and recognize in all of them — even the bad ones — a common character, a numinous significance.” (Margins, two separate notes: “not with physical vision, but with the mind’s eye, or the eye of the spirit”; and “Not with mystical vision” — he refuses both the reductive and the occult readings at once.) And when, in solitude, “we try to ‘feel existence whole’ — concentrating on the actual passage of time, and mentally embracing all experience (‘all that has ever come our way’) — we may have a vivid sense of — what? Of the Mighty Other, weird, holy, dread; a ‘presence’ (but no personal presence). Mysterium Tremendum.” Margin: “to call it personal is to belittle it.”

With The Idea of the Holy now held, the sheets’ debt to Otto can be tested rather than asserted — and it runs much deeper than the two loanwords. The sheet-23 vocabulary reproduces Otto’s dual structure exactly. “Mystery, majesty, formidableness, horror, weirdness, eerie” is the tremendum — Otto’s analysis runs through “awefulness,” tremenda majestas (“aweful majesty”), and the “uncanny,” “eerie,” “weird” of daemonic dread — while “exquisiteness, sweetness, excellence, beauty” is Otto’s fascinans, the second pole he insists belongs to the same object: “the daunting and the fascinating” combined in “a strange harmony of contrasts.” The sheets give the Other both poles together, in Otto’s order — the strongest textual fit in the lecture’s intellectual context, though not, by itself, proof of first-hand reading: the era’s most-read second-hand source carried both poles too (the channel question is weighed at this section’s end). The method matches too: Otto’s numinous “cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind” — the sheets’ emotive words that “indicate… but do not describe”; and the risk Stapledon names out loud (“how dangerous to say this”) is the risk Otto notoriously embraced, inviting any reader who “knows no such moments in his experience… to read no further.” So does the doctrine, at its load-bearing point: Otto argues against Schleiermacher that creature-feeling is secondary, a “shadow” cast by a feeling with “immediate and primary reference to an object outside the self” — which is the sheets’ “in objective existence,” and the ground of Stapledon’s standing refusal to derive worship from the worshipper (§3.2, §3.5). Even the manuscript’s smallest revision keeps Otto’s company: the diagonal “& Majesty” inserted into the salute sentence (§2.6(c)) sets Otto’s majestas beside Beauty — dread’s element joined to fascination’s. Where the two part is where the lecture parts from all doctrine: Otto “schematizes” the numinous into the rational, moral, personal God of Christian theism, and the margin’s answer is already written — “to call it personal is to belittle it.” One channel question must stay open, and it is wider than earlier editions of this analysis allowed. Julian Huxley’s Religion Without Revelation (1927) had quoted Otto’s mysterium-tremendum page at length, and the excerpts carry both poles, not just the dread: the horror that “may be developed into something beautiful, pure, and glorious,” the “uncanny,” “eerie,” “weird” of daemonic dread, and Huxley’s own summary that the numinous feeling “involves both attraction and repulsion, both fascination and fear.” A 1934 reader could therefore have had the dual structure entire from Huxley’s pages without opening Otto; what exceeds those excerpts is thinner than we once claimed — “majesty” (Otto’s tremenda majestas) and the late fiction’s “Wholly Other” (§3.9), neither of them decisive for the 1934 evening. Where the record is firm: by 1939 direct knowledge is certain — Philosophy and Living put The Idea of the Holy on its own reading list (§3.7). And the biography has now moved the terminus back to the lecture’s own doorstep. Crossley documents the reading directly: “In 1934, Olaf read one of the landmarks of modern theology, Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy, and found a kindred spirit” — soon recommending the numinous, the radically other, as the corrective to cozier ideas of religion — and his endnote gives the archival evidence: “The Idea of the Holy is on a list of books read at the back of OS’s 1933–34 diary (SA).” First-hand reading is therefore documented biographical fact, and documented in the diary-year of the South Place lecture — the verdict earlier editions of this analysis had to leave open (“direct knowledge by then is plausible… the manuscript cannot decide”) is settled by the archive rather than the manuscript. What the diary list cannot fix is the month: whether the reading preceded 30 December cannot be pinned more tightly than the 1933–34 span, so the Huxley channel remains a formal possibility for the sheets themselves. But the economical reading is now first-hand: the book was in his hands in the lecture’s season, and the sheets carry its dual structure whole. (The remaining verification item passes to Liverpool: the reading list itself, at the back of the 1933–34 diary.)

He adds a Wordsworthian aside on development — “Youth perhaps is most sensitive to the numinous in particulars (Wordsworth said so) but I am not sure; but as we mature we may respond more deeply to the numinous aspect of our whole experience” — the hedge is his own, kept in the manuscript. The sheet names no poem, but with the Intimations of Immortality ode now held, the natural referent can at least be read beside the aside (the identification remains ours). What “Wordsworth said” is the Ode’s famous doctrine: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”; the Child is the “best Philosopher”; and then the fading — “At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day.” But the aside’s second half — maturity responding “more deeply” to the numinous in the whole — is also in the poem, as its own consolation: “We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind,” in “the philosophic mind,” under an eye “That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality.” If the Ode is what he meant, his gentle correction of Wordsworth moves within the poem’s own arc — he doubts the stanzas everyone quotes and keeps the turn the poem itself makes; what he leaves behind is the doctrine, the pre-existence myth (“trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home”) being exactly the consoling metaphysics sheet 28 will forbid. The Ode was, moreover, standard equipment in precisely this debate: Julian Huxley’s Religion Without Revelation quotes its “obstinate questionings” stanza — “Blank misgivings of a Creature / Moving about in worlds not realised” — as evidence for the natural religious experience (§4), so the aside would have landed on ground the 1927 literature had prepared. He then adds a section on communal worship (sheet 25), distinguishing “mere herd feeling” (gregarious excitement at the crowd’s own presence) from genuine “community in the presence of the Other”: “Together we face God… I, the crowd, face God, the Other. I, the individual, bow, not to the herd, but to God.” Given that fascism’s liturgies of the herd were rising across Europe as he spoke, this distinction between crowd-intoxication and communal worship is quietly political.

(c) Rational considerations. He distinguishes “pettifogging rationalism” — dogmatic, craving certainty and slick interpretation, accepting human reason and current science uncritically, tending “to deny what it cannot cope with” — from the “Larger Rationalism,” whose spirit is “Reasonableness rather than rationality” and which “does not mistake probability for certainty.” Regarding experience in this larger spirit, “we find sheer humanism unsatisfying, because it shuts the windows, draws the blinds, & seeks artificial elegance, oblivious of outer night & the stars. Instead, we boldly go out into the darkness — and we find the superhuman everywhere”: the magnitudes of astronomy (“aeons, expanding space, gigantic inconceivables, Relativity, star-dust”), the minutiae of subatomic physics, the “overwhelming sense of the Vast Inhuman — & that all our knowledge of it is mythical.” And the story of evolution — “its length, wastefulness, precariousness, chanciness; its progressive release of potentiality; its incomprehensibility — & ourselves as moments in it.” The margin distills his anthropology: “conviction that — man is transitional & scarcely a beginning — even, But doomed?” The Great Other includes Man; our own awareness is “the chief mystery for us”; and a second margin presses the point — “but our mystery reaches beyond the human sphere” (he first wrote “has a significance” and struck it, sharpening assertion into reach) — “our striving toward spirituality.”

Then the self-limitation that separates his position from doctrinal theism (sheet 28): the larger rationalism that points beyond humanism “should also restrain us from all doctrine.” We may be tempted to say “surely then there must be a God — a personal God, & benevolent — & therefore all is well, immortality etc etc. But we must not. We must outgrow the craving for security & the desire to have salvation.” What may we say? Only this — the sentence this analysis has treated throughout as the centre of his work, the sentence that contains Star Maker in embryo:

“I am aware of an unspeakable Beauty, & Majesty, which I salute though it destroy me. I can say no more about it, but only about its effects on me.”

(“& Majesty” is a diagonal insertion in the manuscript — an amplification added over the line, not an alternative to “Beauty”; and the sentence originally began with a “that” he struck out, leaving the declaration bare.)

And immediately, the double loyalty that defines his ethics: “I am aware also of the claims of altruism, & of the humanistic ideal. These are the objects of practical loyalty. I ought to serve them unswervingly. — Yet — if fate goes against them, if I suffer, if my beloved suffer, if all men are tortured, even if the human race is destroyed — I must salute the Supreme Beauty which I see.” A marginal note beside this passage quietly fuses the two loyalties: “But their final justification is man’s function as worshipper.”

(d) Pragmatic considerations. Having flown that high, he lands on conduct — because his own definition requires superhumanism to “issue in practice.” He first concedes the dangers again (withdrawal, dream-worlds “peopled with abstractions & doctrines,” dogmatism, persecution, soul-saving, mob hysteria) with the stern rider: “these dangers must be guarded against, not run away from.” Then the comparative psychology: humanism at its best gives “generosity, refinement, fortitude — but: aridity? complacency, lack of detachment.” Undoctrinal superhumanism should and can give “a heightened temper of the will, improved muscular tone of the spirit, which makes a subtle difference in conduct, day by day, minute by minute.”

The psychology of this heightened temper (sheet 30): it presupposes sensibility (“the spirit’s eyes must be open”), but what is revealed “awakens the spirit further” — like a sleeper sensitive to sound whom the bell then wakes. The result: “conduct raised to a new plane, a finer adjustment to circumstances” (his homely comparison: “cp. effects of coffee on thought processes”); “we become more able to live with style (instead of sloppily), to get the best out of ourselves; therefore everything seems more worth while; at once more energy & more detachment — more strength for serving the Ideal (the Human Ideal), & more detachment in success & in failure.”

And the deepest psychological point, the one the “sheer Humanist must lack”: detachment not only from self but from Man. “We feel man to be so small, & to be finally instrumental” — instrumental to what? The margin poses the question and then wavers over its answer: “Instrumental to — what?” — “To worship,” he writes, strikes through, and re-enters with an emphatic double underline; then, diagonally, the alternatives spill out: “To apprehending, & enjoying the universe, & thus — contributing? a distinctive beauty.” The question mark belongs to “what?”; the answer was cancelled and then restored with force — the manuscript records not an open question so much as a wavering settled, for that evening, on worship. Out of this humility “comes a new dignity… the dignity which comes of free subordination of oneself to something more admirable.” The humanist can subordinate himself to the human ideal, “but cannot subordinate Mankind — therefore ultimately not even himself” (sheet 31). The superhumanist’s humility yields “a peace which is unshakable & underlies his dread of the holy, his vision of the horror of existence.”

The closing sheets turn this into intellectual hygiene: the mind sensitive to the superhuman has “a deep ‘felt-scepticism’ of human thought — feels its superficiality, its minute scope, its merely mythical character,” and this “should make him in the long run a better thinker than the pure humanist — a more sensitive, supple, cautious one. He will not take fashionable principles too seriously — e.g. 19th-century materialism, 20th-century mentalism (Eddington), psychoanalysis, the Scientific Attitude. But: he must beware of taking theology seriously too — must avoid all doctrine, welcome all hypothesis.” And the final safeguard against irrationalism (sheet 32): “the Other he worships is irrational to him — freakish, terrible, grisly — but it may yet be in itself systematic; the universe may be intelligible, though not to man — & even man may progressively understand, & must try to do so.” Scepticism about human reason, grounded in reverence, issuing in more inquiry, not less. That is the lecture’s last word.

3. The lecture in the ecology of Stapledon’s work

What the full-corpus reading shows about these 34 sheets is how central they are. The lecture sits near the midpoint of his career and states, in discursive form, the axis on which everything else turns.

3.1 Latter-Day Psalms (1914) and the war letters: the conflict in devotional form

Twenty years earlier, the young Stapledon’s first book had already staged this entire debate as a cycle of psalms. The correspondences are almost one-to-one:

• The lecture’s humanism is the psalm “Humanity”: the Spirit that dwells in the hearts of men — “I am the Soul of All Men… Out of the lives of the ancient multitudes I have awakened” — and “Athena”, who “wilt make of mankind a noble being, even Humanity thy minister.”
  Latter-Day Psalms (1914) ↗ · stanza 62 · stanza 246 — quoted passages in context

  Out of the lives of the ancient multitudes I have awakened and found myself. And lo! I am beautiful, and yearn toward God.

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  Thou wilt make of mankind a noble being, even Humanity thy minister.

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• The lecture’s Mighty Other is “Omnipotence”: “A great fear fell upon me out of the heavens, because of the majesty of God… Thou hast made the heavens for thy plaything. Thou breakest the heart of man like a toy.”
  Latter-Day Psalms (1914) ↗ · stanza 39 · stanza 43 — quoted passages in context

  And a great fear fell upon me out of the heavens, because of the majesty of God.

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  Thou hast made the heavens for thy plaything. Thou breakest the heart of man like a toy."

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• The humanist’s revolt against the cruel Other is there too, in “The City” (“I will make war upon thee, evil God”) and above all “Satan”: “We hail thee, thou God in Man! We magnify thee against God in Heaven” — lowbrow humanism as luciferian defiance.
  Latter-Day Psalms (1914) ↗ · stanza 25 · stanza 338 — quoted passages in context

  I will make war upon thee, evil God. Though thou slay me, I will contrive justice and mercy against thy will."

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  We hail thee, thou God in Man! We mag- nify thee against God in Heaven.

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• And the lecture’s superhumanist resolution — salute the Beauty though it destroy you — is “Apollo”: “Thou carest not for the happines [sic] of men. For beauty only hast thou care… Therefore are hearts broken, even to fulfil thy harmony” — the universe as a terrible work of art, admired as such.
  Latter-Day Psalms (1914) ↗ · stanza 265 — quoted passage in context

  Thou carest not for the happines of men. For beauty only hast thou care.

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• Even the lecture’s insistence that worship must issue in practice is anticipated in “Salvation”: “If indeed thou hast a soul, forget it… Sacrifice even thy soul gladly if the world need.” The biography supplies this psalm’s documented occasion — Crossley calls it “the only psalm for which there is a detailed record of the event that prompted it.” On 22 June 1914, at a Methodist chapel near the family’s Devon farm, a sermon he had thought “at first an eloquent sermon on peace” shifted “to the priority of saving one’s own soul before all else,” and his diary protest of the same day is the psalm’s argument in prose: “There’s more for a man to do than the saving of his own little speck of a soul. Soulsaving is a means, not an end… Why always this insistence on heaven?” The anti-otherworldliness the lecture would still be preaching in 1934 was first set down against an actual sermon, heard in an actual chapel, and versified the same day (“the manuscript bears the same date of 22 June”).
  Latter-Day Psalms (1914) ↗ · stanza 237 — quoted passage in context

  Sacrifice even thy soul gladly if the world need. Or if thou canst save it, save it not to be thine, but to be God's.

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  Crossley, Speaking for the Future (1994) ↗ · ¶ 545 · ¶ 546 · ¶ 547 — quoted passages in context

  The other intriguing poem from this period is "Salvation," written at Galsworthy, the farm in Devon. It is the only psalm for which there is a detailed record of the event that prompted it. On 22 June the tenant farmers at Galsworthy, Mr. and Mrs. Fishleigh, invited their landlord's son to join them for worship at a local Methodist chapel, a squat, almost windowless building lit by oil lamps—very different from the graceful Anglican parish church on a hilltop at Northam a few miles away where the seafaring generations of Stapledons were buried. The minister, using a text from the Epistle to the Ephesians, began what Olaf thought at first an eloquent sermon on peace: "The people listened and sometimes murmured approval, and some sighed at the first mention of peace." But then the preaching shifted to the priority of saving one's own soul before all else, and Olaf became annoyed, for the sermon contradicted both his Liverpool-fired social sense and his own visionary theological politics:

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  There's more for a man to do than the saving of his own little speck of a soul. Soulsaving is a means, not an end. If every one "saves" his own soul the greater end, the "saving" of all souls & all soul, will be done. A man's first duty is to save his own soul only because his own soul is the bit of soul that has been entrusted to him to save, not because if he doesn't save his soul he'll go to hell and be burnt, nor because if he doesn't save it he won't get that peace. . . . Why always this insistence on heaven? As if a few years spent down here were to earn eternal peace or damnation! Rubbish. If we go on living as personalities after death we go on striving and stumbling and climbing.[37]

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  Immediately (the manuscript bears the same date of 22 June) Olaf turned this experience into a poetic dialogue that begins:

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The 1914 book oscillates between these voices without adjudicating. The 1934 lecture supplies what the psalms could only dramatize: a logic for the oscillation (humanism sound but insufficient; worship valid but doctrine forbidden). Whether he himself thought of the lecture as settling the psalter no document says — twenty years, a doctorate, an ethics treatise, two novels and a popular philosophy book lie between.

The psalms’ engine survives in his private correspondence too. On 24 March 1914, while writing the book, the 27-year-old Stapledon tried the thought on his cousin Agnes Miller (not yet, in any settled way, his fiancée — the engagement’s chronology is layered: Crossley documents a first acceptance just before the Bangor summer school of late July 1914, “though by mid-August she had changed her mind”; a renewed acceptance by the time he crossed to France on 1 August 1915 — “although the war made theirs a marathon engagement”; and the published letters record the public engagement in November 1915, Agnes proposing it “of your own free will” and Olaf exulting “So now we really are engaged.” Earlier editions of this analysis gave the November 1915 date alone; see ERRATA.md): “You say ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want’… For you and me and many others it is absolutely true. But for many, perhaps very many, it is by no means true at all… How then shall I complacently say ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ when they are utterly outside all gentle shepherding?… when we sing that beautiful psalm let it be with an utter humility and fear, knowing that for some unknowable reason we are favoured” (Talking Across the World, ed. Crossley). The moral seriousness that drives the lecture’s “sense of obligation toward others” — and the refusal of any comfortable creed that ignores the unlucky — is already fully formed at twenty-seven, in a love letter.

A complete pass through the published Stapledon–Miller correspondence (1913–1919) shows, in fact, that nearly every load-bearing element of the 1934 lecture’s religious half was rehearsed in these letters, a full decade before A Modern Theory of Ethics gave it philosophical form (the ethical machinery — fulfilment-of-capacity, the lowbrow/highbrow typology, the intuitionist meta-ethics — had to wait for the 1929 book):

• The double vision under the stars — 1913. The earliest documented version of what would become Star Maker’s “two lights” is a letter of 6 June 1913, written at twenty-seven after a WEA committee meeting: “suddenly I had that rare and wonderful feeling of the great distance of the stars, and of their intent gaze upon the earth. Everything happening on the earth grew not only insignificant, by reason of that great space freckled with other stellar systems, but also, in a strange way, of desperate importance, because of the intent gaze of the stars.” Insignificance and desperate importance, in one experience — the lecture’s whole dialectic, before the Great War, before the psalms were even published. And the letter carries its own proto-Freudian hedge, the very suspicion the 1934 lecture will have to answer: “I wonder what these feelings mean, whether they are mere tricks of the mind, or have some bearing on the true nature of things.” The biography pushes the genealogy two years further back, into letters outside the published edition. Among what Crossley calls the “frivolous prose sketches of 1911” is a fantasy of a dance that lifts off from a Liverpool dinner party — fiddle-music drifting in “from the constellation of Orion,” the waltzing feet buffing the earth until the planet would “gleam in the eye of a cosmic beholder” — at the end of which the 24-year-old wrote: “I wonder what glories are beyond. One would like to lift up the corner of the curtain at the sunset some evening, where the glory comes underneath it. But I suppose curtains are not meant to be lifted—or only by some people”; Crossley’s own gloss is that “Twenty-five years would pass before he returned to extend that image in the glorious fourth chapter on interstellar exploration in Star Maker.” And a letter of January 1913, defending his closeness to his cousin Dorothy to his mother, already states mutual regard in the lecture’s grammar of kinship rather than craving: “We are looking, not into each other’s eyes with a sense of excitement, but out of each other’s eyes with a sense of kinship.”
  Letters (1913–19) ↗ · ¶ 54 — quoted passage in context

  […] made it a prineiple to stop people from smoking in a nonsmoking earriage. My hat I did hate the job, and the smokers hated me! I gave up that as a prineiple, yet I generally persuade people not to smoke in nonsmoking plaees, beeause it is a mean unfair triek. How killing! Think of a small ehubby kid solemnly announeing that though he did not mind smoke himself, smoking being against the rules, he would tell the guard! Said the mountain to the squirrel 'Tittle prig!” You are tired of this diseourse, and so am I. Last night after a eommittee meeting at whieh I was eommanded to write two artieles and a letter to the papers within a week, I walked down the new road towards the eoast in the starlight. I was worrying about the artieles and other mundane things. Then I began thinking about Switzerland, and (with all due respeet Miss) about you. While I was thus oeeupied I looked up, and suddenly I had that rare and wonderful feeling of the great distanee of the stars, and of their intent gaze upon the earth. Everything happening on the earth grew not only insignifieant, by reason of that great spaee freekled with other stellar systems, but also, in a strange way, of desperate importanee, beeause of the intent gaze of the stars. I wonder what these feelings mean, whether they are mere trieks of the mind, or have some bearing on the true nature of things. The stars are as a rule wonderfully soothing eompanions, elearing away worry simply by implying insignifieanee; but when they begin staring at one like that it is diseoneerting. Do you know what I mean? As a rule

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  the held text is uncorrected OCR of the print edition, which often confuses c and e (“ehureh” for “church”); the excerpt is shown exactly as held.
  Crossley, Speaking for the Future (1994) ↗ · ¶ 462 · ¶ 496 — quoted passages in context

  Among the frivolous prose sketches of 1911 is a charming fantasy about himself as a dancer swaying to the homely music of a Liverpool dinner party. Abruptly his toes leave the floor and he flies out from Merseyside to the Sahara to the Indian Ocean, acquiring a lengthening string of partners while the music of fiddles and fifes drifts in from the constellation of Orion. At last he joins Agnes Miller in Australia in a universal waltz that, he fancies, with many feet would smooth and buff the earth's surface, making the planet gleam in the eye of a cosmic beholder. Twenty-five years would pass before he returned to extend that image in the glorious fourth chapter on interstellar exploration in *Star Maker*, but for now he was tentatively identifying the mysteries that would claim his most mature speculations: "I wonder what glories are beyond. One would like to lift up the corner of the curtain at the sunset some evening, where the glory comes underneath it. But I suppose curtains are not meant to be lifted—or only by some people."[35]

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  course, and through its very use & wont would never have been so earnestly desired! In fact you make me laugh at myself for having to act the part of a clandestine adorer, which I am not! It is no use talking. But there is just one other point. Dorothy, do believe me, does not in the least take my attention off other girls; rather the reverse, since I began to know what a girl is like. I that you believe that, because otherwise it merely that you do not at all understand me. If anyone were to hold my attention in that way, I assure you it would not be Dot, but another, with regard to whom also I fear you do not understand. . . . But *surely* you see the difference between a close blood relation and an outsider. I like Dot because we are so much the same, & all that. But the whole fun of the thing would be gone if somehow we were to cease to be such near blood relations. All our relations are the same except our parents. She is the nearest relation I have (here) of my own generation. We are looking, not *into* each other's eyes with a sense of excitement, but *out* of each other's eyes with a sense of kinship. However, the longer I talk, the worse I shall make it seem.

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• The night sky as church — January 1915. The lecture’s central claim, that the numinous apprehension of the non-human whole is religious in standing, appears verbatim in a letter of 9 January 1915: “the night sky is the greatest of all churches.” And the same letter already contains the humanist’s counter-case and the superhumanist’s answer: when one is “in revolt against the earth,” the stars become “appalling — the inevitable machinery of the universe, grinding on for ever… careless altogether of its children”; yet “the best awakening is not to run away from it… but to stay out in the night and make oneself to feel that it is not just a great factory building, but indeed a church after all, wherein is a spirit or a God to be loved more than one’s little self.” Factory or church — sheet 26’s “gigantic inconceivables” and sheet 28’s salute, twenty years early.
  Letters (1913–19) ↗ · ¶ 112 — quoted passage in context

  1915 [Beatrice and Alfred Fryer, Agnes’ hosts when she stayed in Rouen in 1913 and 1914, told Olaf about the Ambulance Unit established by the Society of Friends and the work it was doing. From this point forward the Friends Ambulance Unit became Olaf s goal for a kind of war service that would satisfy his desire to participate in the suffering without joining in the fighting.] Garsdale, Liverpool TO AGNES 9 January 1915 . . . I am so glad you have grown to love the stars. I think the night sky is the greatest of all ehurehes. One is not always in the mood to go to that partieular ehureh, for sometimes one is too busy with the earth to bother about the stars; but even at those times if one is foreed to be under the stars a while, say walking home at night, one soon begins willy nilly to listen to them, and it is as if a door were opened in one’s mind, and one were to walk out of oneself into heaven. There is only one time when the stars are not ealming. That is when one is already in revolt against the earth and its laws. Then it is appalling to think of the inevitable maehinery of the universe, grinding on for ever and ever, producing life and destroying it, careless altogether of its children, caring only about the will of the great Engineer, which will is by no means ours. That is a nightmare. Yet I think that even from that the best awakening is not to run away from it, so to speak, and drown oneself in this little world, but to stay out in the night and make oneself to feel that it is not just a great factory building, but indeed a church after all, wherein is a spirit or a God to be loved more than one’s little self. Then it all goes right again. But it is hard to reach that point, and one easily slops back into egotism. . . . 69

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  the held text is uncorrected OCR of the print edition, which often confuses c and e (“ehureh” for “church”); the excerpt is shown exactly as held.
• The dual God — September 1914. Weeks after the war broke out: “A great and inscrutable God is he; a terrible and a loving. People will insist on calling him the one or the other, whereas he is both… The wise will accept God as a war god and also as a loving god.” This is Latter-Day Psalms’ oscillation stated as doctrine — and the seed of the lecture’s refusal to let worship settle into the comfortable half of the antinomy. Note, though, what the lecture will have to shed: the letters’ Other is still a person — “a terrible and a loving” God, “the great Engineer,” one “of whom Life and Love are our nearest image” — precisely the framing the 1934 discipline (“to call it personal is to belittle it”) strikes out.
  Letters (1913–19) ↗ · ¶ 95 · ¶ 112 — quoted passages in context

  52 Talking Across the World edly in the next five months, to the problem of how to respond to the call to arms.] Annery 1 September 1914 in bed ehewing apples TO AGNES Anniversary of Sedan . . . I told Mother I had been thinking of applying. She had just been talking of the urgent need of eheeking the Germans. But my remark was a horrid blow, & I felt like a murderer & a matrieide. I proeeeded to be mueh enraged with me and her and the Kaiser. It was as if I had said I was going to be shot tomorrow. So I have shut up for the present. But ifs rather disgusting to have to sit still and hear of the advanee on Paris, and to see all these fellows getting ready. Guess I must go sooner or later if things don't vastly improve. But Mother would be all to pieees if I even applied for a eommission now. Might quietly apply without saying until the aetual offer eame, which would probably not be for months. We’ll see. . . . Between now and your going we will see as much of each other as possible, and I will be whatever you want me to be, but I will certainly be in love with you. The rest is God’s affair. So also is the war. A great and inscrutable God is he; a terrible and a loving. People will insist on calling him the one or the other, whereas he is both. He, if he is at all, has a mighty sense of humour. . . . He knocks the heads of the nations together and laughs when they take vengeance not on him but on each other, calling him their ally all the while. He fills the soldiers with madness, and makes young workmen to sacrifice wife and home and good work in order that they may satisfy their own longing to be courageous. He breaks off all threads of innumerable lives and innumerable noble works, and bids men to kill, destroy, and cease from holiness. To some he appears simply as a god of battles, to others as a good god harassed by the Devil. Some say there is no god now, others say God is not loving but terrible. Some see all around that he is terrible, and know by his clear message in their hearts that he is gentle. The wise will accept God as a war god and also as a loving god. [Olaf wrote Agnes two letters on 2 October, one to be sent to her immediately at Garsdale, the other to be posted to South Africa to await her arrival on board a Blue Funnel liner at Capetown on her journey home. The first complains about her behavior toward him in the present; the second imagines the degree to which in the future they each will become disembodied to the other.]

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  1915 [Beatrice and Alfred Fryer, Agnes’ hosts when she stayed in Rouen in 1913 and 1914, told Olaf about the Ambulance Unit established by the Society of Friends and the work it was doing. From this point forward the Friends Ambulance Unit became Olaf s goal for a kind of war service that would satisfy his desire to participate in the suffering without joining in the fighting.] Garsdale, Liverpool TO AGNES 9 January 1915 . . . I am so glad you have grown to love the stars. I think the night sky is the greatest of all ehurehes. One is not always in the mood to go to that partieular ehureh, for sometimes one is too busy with the earth to bother about the stars; but even at those times if one is foreed to be under the stars a while, say walking home at night, one soon begins willy nilly to listen to them, and it is as if a door were opened in one’s mind, and one were to walk out of oneself into heaven. There is only one time when the stars are not ealming. That is when one is already in revolt against the earth and its laws. Then it is appalling to think of the inevitable maehinery of the universe, grinding on for ever and ever, producing life and destroying it, careless altogether of its children, caring only about the will of the great Engineer, which will is by no means ours. That is a nightmare. Yet I think that even from that the best awakening is not to run away from it, so to speak, and drown oneself in this little world, but to stay out in the night and make oneself to feel that it is not just a great factory building, but indeed a church after all, wherein is a spirit or a God to be loved more than one’s little self. Then it all goes right again. But it is hard to reach that point, and one easily slops back into egotism. . . . 69

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  the held text is uncorrected OCR of the print edition, which often confuses c and e (“ehureh” for “church”); the excerpt is shown exactly as held.
• The proto-Star Maker — September 1915. The single most astonishing document in the correspondence is a “fairy story” written from his sleeping bag at the Belgian front on 16 September 1915: he and Agnes fly hand-in-hand out among the stars; every star is seen to be a sun, all worlds and all their creatures become transparent, “and of each one we felt ‘It is I’”; then “suddenly all time became now,” and “an overwhelming sense came over us that a third person was present, one outside and beyond all creation, one of whom Life and Love are our nearest image. Then came the Truth. There the fairy tale breaks down hopelessly…” — cosmic flight, communal identification, the eternal present, the encounter that language cannot survive, and the waking — “the perception of that Truth woke me up, in my sleeping bag, alone”: the entire frame of Star Maker, twenty-two years before the novel, addressed to one reader. (The novel would move the waking to a hillside; the letter’s is humbler.)
  Letters (1913–19) ↗ · ¶ 145 — quoted passage in context

  […] so, watehing the lives begin and die, watehing the worlds do so also. Watehing, but never looking from eaeh other’s eyes. But at last a feeling that this was not all, that there was another, deeper truth to unloek, made me take you in my arms (at last after all those aeons), and you lifted up your faee, and it was as I have seen it before in the darkness onee, solemn and happy. And you were kissed on the lips. We were a real flesh and blood eouple up there in the skies, and we were dressed in the clothes of this world. Therefore the embrace was a very real and ordinary one, also gentle, and willing on both sides. But again came a change. Suddenly all time became now. That means nothing to us here, but in the fairy tale it meant that everything that ever happened or will happen was for ever present fact. The heavens also in their immensity were seen to be a very small thing, and an overwhelming sense came over us that a third person was present, one outside and beyond all creation, one of whom Life and Love are our nearest image. Then came the Truth. There the fairy tale breaks down hopelessly, and can only wind up by saying that the perception of that Truth woke me up, in my sleeping bag, alone. Egremont TO OLAF i8 September 1915 . . . This week I had your first letters from France. Two letters. I had waited 2 weeks & two days for them so I was very glad to get them. But I nearly wept with indignation or was it annoyance? when I saw that the first page was cut about by the censor in such a reckless manner that only half the page was left. It was all the part telling of your drive from where you landed to where you got to (won’t that sentence mystify the Censor if he bothers to read [my] letters? which I hope he doesn’t). It was very sad about the car getting banged. I nearly wept at that too. You do seem to have such rotten luck. But it will all come right in time. I am just so impatient again for news of you because that all seemed so new & strange & unreal. I […]

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  the held text is uncorrected OCR of the print edition, which often confuses c and e (“ehureh” for “church”); the excerpt is shown exactly as held.
• The war’s lesson — May 1918. After three years of ambulance work he compressed what the FAU had taught him into a formula that is the lecture’s twin loyalties in embryo: “the great need after the war will be for these very two qualities — detached sympathy, and a faith in beauty and goodness that is strong enough to afford to realise evil.” A faith strong enough to afford realism: that is the salute, defined by what it does not need to look away from.
  Letters (1913–19) ↗ · ¶ 344 — quoted passage in context

  301 our strange position can realise it without losing sight of the infinitely greater beauty of the world as a whole. Woe to us if we fail to realise the horror or the beauty. I believe that the great need after the war will be for these very two qualities—detached sympathy and a faith in beauty and goodness that is strong enough to afford to realise evil. May 1918 [Antoinette Trebelli, daughter of the famed nineteenth-century French mezzo-soprano Zelia Trebelli, took the stage name of Antonia Dolores. She did not enjoy the operatic success of her mother, but her reputation as an “artistic” singer filled concert halls when she went on tour.] Egremont TO OLAF 21 May 1918 . . . Last Saturday week it was the German Circle. At our last few summer meetings we have gone into the Botanical Gardens to read instead of in Fraulein Hasselman s room in town. But it was very disturbing in the gardens for we dare not be overheard talking in the hated German tongue & there were crowds of people all about, so we only attempted silly light comedies & we had altogether rather a skittish time with affected coughings & nudgings to warn each other […]

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  the held text is uncorrected OCR of the print edition, which often confuses c and e (“ehureh” for “church”); the excerpt is shown exactly as held.
• The manuscript in his pocket. Through all of this he was carrying in his pocket (“as being on the whole the safest place”) the much-rewritten philosophical manifesto he called In a Glass Darkly and later The Sleeping Beauty — “and shall be blown to bits with it,” he wrote, at once taking it back: “all this talk about blowing to bits is a ‘blague,’ because it is utter peace here.” It was his declared answer to “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?” (“I wrote a book… if the book be the true & beautiful thing that I am trying to make it, it will justify me”). The book was never published, but its project — psalms argued into philosophy — is exactly what A Modern Theory of Ethics, Waking World, and the South Place lecture eventually delivered.
  Letters (1913–19) ↗ · ¶ 355 · ¶ 317 — quoted passages in context

  […] We are not so likely to go wrong over them. SSA 13 Agnes, 6 July 1918 Just a line in ease there is no ehanee of more this week. Our existenee here is one of the queerest possible—midnight alarums & exeursions, mid-day glorious bathes or very dusty running. It is quite theatrieal, & the reality of war is nowhere. Were I to tell you about it all you would be vastly amused, but I ean’t. We are vastly amused during the day, but the shades of night put us into a vein of petty tragedy. ... I am earrying about in my poeket (as being on the whole the safest plaee) the mueh beseribbled manuseript of the world’s greatest and still unpublished flight of imagination, namely my book! If I keep it in my ear the ear will get blown to bits and burnt, like Harry’s. If I leave it with our own embusques they will get blown to bits. If I bury it the earth itself will be blasted. So I earry it, and shall be blown to bits with it. Quod erat faeiendum. Poor old manuseript! It eould not be read by anyone but me anyhow, in its so beseribbled-over eondition. And if it eould, it is so unfinished as to be useless till there is a real ehanee of working at it. Of eourse you understand, dear, that all this talk about blowing to bits is a “blague,” beeause it is utter peace here; otherwise I should probably not be joking on that subject. But heaven help the infantry man in such battles as have been during this year. Words fail. But one’s mind is full of the tragedy of the foot-soldier-man. The worst that happens to us is child’s play for him.

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  […] the age of the beginning of the new alignment of life, at least if we all try hard enough. . . . Lately I have been thinking with little content about “In a Glass Darkly” and planning out considerable additions to it, & alterations. If I can get the additions adequately written the whole will be a far bigger thing than before, & actually a book. Was there ever a book that took so much re-writing? Indeed it has not been written, it has grown of its own accord & very spasmodically. I don’t know if I am doing right or wrong in giving so much time & thought to this one effort. I don’t know that I even care whether it is right or wrong. All I care is that the book when it is completed shall be sound. If in years to come the world (!) asks me, ‘'What did you do in the great war?” and I have to say, “I wrote a book,” I don’t care for the world’s condemnation, nor for anybody’s; for if the book be the true & beautiful thing that I am trying to make it, it will justify me; & if after all it is nothing and I have to be ashamed of myself for a waster—well, there’s an end of it, and one more man ashamed of himself won’t harm the Idea, and the Idea is all that matters. And faith, I did not try to avoid the war so as to write a book. I did my best to get into the war while not betraying the Idea; and since the war would not have me on those terms more than as an ambulance driver—tant pis, and all the more obligation to serve directly the Idea by laborious thought & writing. . . . The other evening we read “Twelfth Night” and I took Sir Toby Belch with much relish. We have some rather good readers amongst us, especially one [Frederick] Jeffrey who is called Amelia because (oh horrid pun!) when he first came to us he was sent as an orderly to an outstation where the drivers reported that he greatly “ameliorated” their lot! Amelia took Portia in “The Merchant […]

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  the held text is uncorrected OCR of the print edition, which often confuses c and e (“ehureh” for “church”); the excerpt is shown exactly as held.

The war years also produced his first public prose statement of the creed-in-embryo (the 1914 Latter-Day Psalms, above, had already put it into published verse). “The Reflections of an Ambulance Orderly,” published in the Quaker weekly The Friend in April 1916 (newly recovered via the Crossley Reader), watches a gas-attack evacuation begin under “Venus and Jupiter… in the twilight” and finds the mature position’s two fixed points already in place: the old grey church, whose “aloofness… seemed a symbol of that consciousness of all humanity which sometimes flashes on the mind to make war ridiculous,” and the closing declaration — “under the shadow of our old grey church, and under the light of the stars, war itself may help a man to a new knowledge of the communion of all men. The spirit that is mankind is mad to-day perhaps; but out of the madness she will come purified wondrously. We, her tiny members, need to be purified with her. That is why we are here.” Community below, stars above, service justified by both: the lecture’s whole architecture, in a war dispatch at twenty-nine.

One more biographical episode belongs here, because it is the lecture’s ethics enacted. When Agnes finally reached England in 1919 she confessed, on her first day ashore, that she had half fallen in love with an officer on the voyage. The wedding was postponed; the letters resumed. Olaf’s response, recorded in her later letter to her parents, was that this made her “even more worth it than before, because it showed that I was a real human girl & not only the writer of a thousand letters” — and his own letters of those weeks insist “I am stubborn in love… It is solid stone and it will stand.” It is tempting to hear, in this, the man who would tell the South Place audience that worship must be of the real — not of one’s consoling image — practising that discipline on the person he loved most. But the link is conjecture, and the episode is a discipline of jealousy forgiven, not of tragedy accepted; what the letters themselves show is the realism. Whether it stands behind sheet 28’s “if my beloved suffer” the documents do not say.

3.2 A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929): the philosophical machinery

One correction from the biography before the book is opened. Earlier editions of this analysis called A Modern Theory of Ethics Stapledon’s doctoral thesis; Crossley separates the two documents. The doctorate came first and was never published: “Late in 1924 he submitted his doctoral thesis in the area of inquiry now called semiotics,” he took the degree at Liverpool on 5 March 1925, and “The one-word title of his thesis, ‘Meaning,’” — Crossley calls it — “was concise, cryptic, and brazenly inclusive.” The Ethics was a subsequent and separate project, begun on his supervisor’s advice after the degree: “he drafted almost half of A Modern Theory of Ethics by midsummer 1925,” and the book appeared from Methuen in January 1929. So the book is the thesis-trained mind at work, not the thesis in print, and this analysis now says “the 1929 book” where it used to say “the thesis” (see ERRATA.md). The biography also supplies the book’s first audience, and with it the earliest documented rehearsal of the lecture’s whole quarrel. The Liverpool Philosophy Seminar — the biweekly departmental symposium Stapledon kept attending as a postgraduate — “now became the proving ground for the chapters of A Modern Theory of Ethics”; and his own report to Agnes of one session names the fight: it was “mostly me against the rest, about the religious sense.” The dispute South Place heard in December 1934 had been argued for years, against professional philosophers, in the seminar whose whole procedure his supervisor Alexander Mair liked to describe as letting a paper “be tried on the dog.”

The lecture’s conceptual vocabulary is that 1929 book compressed for a lay audience:

• The humanist ideal as fulfilment of capacity is the book’s central doctrine: “It is demanded, namely, that the richest possible capacities should ‘awake’ in this world, and that the greatest possible fulfilment of those capacities should be attained” (ch. XII). The lecture’s “knowing, feeling, striving” triad, the insistence that each involves the others, the “levelling up” politics — all are in chapter XII, including the hierarchical world he prefers (“it may be that society should be hierarchical. But such an ideal can only be transitional”). The book is harsher than the lecture, though: it demands that everyone be “not merely fulfilled up to the limit of his capacity, but of the very highest capacity,” calls the man who achieves less “a cripple, an unfortunate, and a scourge to society,” and insists that “by hook or by crook, we must contrive that lives of drudgery be no longer necessary to society.” The lecture’s softening mitigation — mechanization letting each attain fulness “up to the limit of his capacity” — is the platform’s addition, not the book’s.
  A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929) ↗ · ¶ 230 · ¶ 233 · ¶ 231 — quoted passages in context

  220 A MODERN THEORY OF ETHICS identical. Brown and Jones each embraced within his mental content an identical excerpt from the one real. The objective fulfilment is therefore not duplicated. But, on the other hand, two psychical capacities are fulfilled, in Brown and Jones ; and in this respect at least there is double value in the double achievement. Every individual, once he is in existence, is a ground of intrinsic ends. The needs of his private nature constitute a demand for fulfilment which must not be simply ignored even in the cosmic ideal; though of course it may well be that his needs must be partially or even wholly rejected for the sake of higher needs. Every individual, then, once he exists, is a ground of ends; but what individuals there ought to be, how many and of what characters, is prescribed by the needs of society in its particular environment, and ultimately by the needs of the universe. The immediate practical ideal is clearly the greatest possible fulfilment of the needs (or capacities) of extant human beings. But since new human beings keep flooding the earth, we cannot take into account only the present generation. The immediate practical ideal must include the production of individuals capable of the richest fulfil- ment rather than of individuals crippled before birth. But again, since the richest fulfilment of individuals entails social organization, the number and character of the individuals to come must depend on the demands of the ideal form of the future society in its particular environ- ment. And this in turn depends on the capacity of the future individuals that it may be possible to produce. The ideal, then, is that this real world, or, as some would say, a future real world continuous with this, should be char- acterized by a certain universal. But this universal itself is prescribed by the nature of the world as it isin fact. It is demanded, namely, that the richest possible capacities should ‘ awake ’ in this world, and that the greatest possible fulfilment of those capacities should be attained. In fact, the ideal is that the real should be so organized that the highest possible tendencies should emerge and be fulfilled. The ideal is prescribed fully by the character and

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  ESSENTIALS OF THE CONCRETE IDEAL 223 problems, they are not in principle insoluble., For what ought to be sought is not merely the greatest subjective delight but the greatest objective fulfilment of the one world. But, of course, the fulfilment that is to be sought is not simply the greatest fulfilment at some remote millennium, but the greatest fulfilment throughout all time. This abstract form of the ideal may seem to have but the remotest bearing on our practical politics. For we may agree as to the abstract ideal, yet violently differ as to how it is to be realized in Europe to-day. Yet there is some reason to say that our general, though perhaps remote, aim must be a ‘ personalistic socialism ’, a socialism whose aim is the levelling up (but not down) of the capa- cities and activities of persons, rather than the establish- ment of a certain form of social organization. Of course it is possible that in transitional stages such as ours this ideal may be altogether impracticable and therefore a snare. It may be that, so long as there is low-grade work to be done, society must include low-grade minds to do it, since finer minds cannot devote themselves to such work without lack of fulfilment. It may be, therefore, that society should be hierarchical. But such an ideal can only be transitional. The low-grade human mind is yet human, having in its nature rudiments of the highest. Our beasts perhaps may achieve fulfilment in servitude, but the normal human mind is capable, in favourable circumstances, of something more than a life of drudgery. Therefore, by hook or by crook, we must contrive that lives of drudgery be no longer necessary to society. And since even the mentally deficient are not simply animal, but ‘ spoiled’ bits of humanity, incapable of a merely animal harmony, we cannot be content simply to allocate them to low-grade work. There must be an end to the production of indi- viduals who are defective physically or mentally, and an exploration of the means of producing higher individuals, that is to say, individuals capable of a wider span and deeper penetration of cognition, and of more generous conation. Further, since the aim is that every mind should be ingredient in every other, we must seek to break

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  ESSENTIALS OF THE CONCRETE IDEAL 221 potentiality of the real as it now is, by the character and potentiality of a certain particular, though that particular be the universe. The ideal is that ‘is particular universe, that happens to exist, should be fulfilled as richly as pos- sible, not (per impossibile) that this universe should be wiped out and another of a more elegant kind substituted for it. The practical ideal, the only ideal which we can envisage, is human ; and being human it is social. But its sociality is derivative, not essential. Essentially the practical ideal is the fulfilment of human mental capacity, and its exercise upon the richest possible objective content; but this fulfilment quite certainly entails sociality. The practical ideal, in fact, is that the human race should achieve the highest possible mentality and the richest possible culture. And this mentality and culture must be particularized in just so many individuals, neither more nor less, as are necessary for its perfection. But so long as there is an excess of individuals (if there be), they also have their rights. The immediate ideal must not simply neglect them, even for the sake of the ultimate mental perfection of the race. But the more remote ideal is that there should be just so many individuals as are needed to perfect human capacity and culture. Further, lest some individuals should lack fulfilment, it is demanded in the ideal that every one should be, not merely fulfilled up to the limit of his capacity, but of the very highest capacity. For a man who achieves less than full humanity is so far a cripple, an unfortunate, and a scourge to society.. Thus it is demanded that each individual should know all that is known and will the good. If this encyclopaedic know- ledge seems preposterous, let us say that each should know at least schematically all that is known, so that he may will the good. For if any were to know less than the schema of all knowledge, or will less than the ideal, the harmony of all would be destroyed, and the activity of the whole would be discrepant with itself, and the pro- gressive discovery and achievement of yet higher ideals would be hindered. But if each is to know all and will

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• The lecture’s cosmic turn is the book’s “Cosmical Ideal”: “to assert that human capacities are in fact the highest would be very rash… In man, the real… becomes a centre from which the universe begins to know itself.” The lecture’s marginal note “man is transitional” is this doctrine in two words.
  A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929) ↗ · ¶ 235 — quoted passage in context

  ESSENTIALS OF THE CONCRETE IDEAL 225 universe, nor any possibility of achieving this cosmic ideal, then it is from the needs of humanity alone that the ideal arises. For goodness is essentially the fulfilment of tendency and capacity, and so long as there is any tendency, of whatever rank, there is a possibility of good. \As to the good, the ideal, it is the greatest possible harmonious fulfilment of whatever capacities are inherent in the substance of the universe. If the highest possible activities are human social activities, or if the highest that can be brought about is some development of these, then these must be the chief ground of the ideal. But to assert that human capacities are in fact the highest, would be very rash. The human ideal is clear at least in its barest outlines. Though in practice it gives rise to a thousand conflicting policies and bitter hatreds, the aim of all who adopt the standpoint of humanity is to fulfil and progressively enrich human capacity. This, as we have seen, means in the last resort to increase and refine the content of man’s mind and to conform his will to the need cognized in that content. But this is not the last word to be said. If we may take man as a true sample of the nature of the real, we may find in the human ideal hints of the cosmical. Man’s subjectivity, we say, fulfils itself in cognizing as widely and deeply as possible the nature of the objective real, and in willing as justly as possible its fulfilment. But _ man’s subjectivity itself, we have supposed, is emergent _ In the same kind of real (suitably organized) as that which it embraces as its object. In man, then, the real fulfils itself by knowing and being known, by exfoliating into ever subtler kinds of activity, and by willing the ends of that activity. That, which in mere physical and chemical action expresses its nature superficially, achieves in the human organism a new sphere of activity. It becomes a centre from which the universe begins to know itself and to will universal fulfilment. The cosmical ideal, then, would seem to be as follows. In the first place the Whole, as a whole, shall know all. There shall be no fragment that does not partake (through 15

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• Most importantly, the lecture’s “felt acquaintance with a positive Something” is the book’s phenomenology of ecstasy (chs. XIV–XV): the “appreciation of an unfamiliar and surpassing excellence in the total object of familiar experience,” most distinct “when we are being forced to surrender our most cherished ends,” in which “not only victory but also defeat, even final catastrophe, is experienced as good” — we “seem to stand above the battle in which we ourselves are eager and hard-pressed fighters, and to admire it as a work of divine art” (the book keeps its “seem” exactly where the lecture will later plant its “no doctrine”). The book’s key paradox — that ecstasy irradiates familiar values rather than annulling them, making us “even more active in their defence than we were before our enlightenment” — becomes the lecture’s pragmatic claim: worship gives “at once more energy & more detachment,” more strength for the human ideal, not less. The book even contains the lecture’s anti-doctrinal safeguard, warning against mistaking “detachment from lower values for the sake of higher” for “emancipation from value itself.”
  A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929) ↗ · ¶ 256 · ¶ 263 · ¶ 259 · ¶ 258 · ¶ 260 — quoted passages in context

  246 A MODERN THEORY OF ETHICS publicly established by the testimony of many persons who, claiming to have had it, have established also their own honesty and their accuracy of introspection. But, alas, it is almost impossible to disentangle their data from their interpretations. The professed mystics may have seen the truth, but they fail to describe it intelligibly, and their interpretations are often naive. Here, however, I am concerned with something less remote than the experience of the great mystics, namely, a mood which may happen to very many of us if not to all. Perhaps I am not entitled to use the term ‘ ecstasy ’ to signify experiences which, it may be, are wholly unlike the alleged mystical ecstasy. Yet I adopt this magnilo- quent word to mark the fact that the experience under discussion is strikingly different from all our ordinary value-experiences, and that it involves a sense of exaltation ; and further, that the excellence which it claims to appre- hend is conceived as the attribute not of a part but of the whole universe, or of the whole universe as it is presented to the individual. It is an experience which, though it may occur but rarely in the life of any particular person, is not properly called super-normal. I would hazard the guess that, though many might disown the experience entirely, they have as a matter of fact had it, but have failed to distinguish it from other experiences somewhat like it, or have perhaps simply failed to notice it when it has occurred. For it is an experience which must be very carefully introspected if we would neither overlook it entirely nor mistake it for something else. To careful introspection it appears to be neither an enjoyment: of teleological fulfil- ment nor a mystical apprehension of the reality behind familiar appearances. It is essentially, I should say, the appreciation of an unfamiliar and surpassing excellence in the total object of familiar experience. It is not insight into the ‘ reality ’ behind ‘ appearances ’, but discovery of a hitherto unappreciated excellence of the familiar world itself. As with disillusion, so also the mood which I have called ecstasy is very possibly conditioned by the state of the body. As in the one case certain physiological changes

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  DISILLUSION AND ECSTASY 253 (D) SUMMARY I would summarize this account of the ecstatic experience as follows. (a) The experient does not seem to himself to apprehend some hitherto hidden reality or occult substance. He seems to appreciate something presented in ordinary experience but not hitherto appreciated. (b) The object which he appreciates is not simply the particular object with which his attention has been engaged, whether an aesthetic object, an object of intellectual contemplation, a tragic or triumphant event, or what not. He appreciates rather the whole of existence as it is revealed to him in ordinary experience. But he appreciates it with the help of, or through the symbolism of, the particular object with which his attention has been engaged. (c) The excellence which he seems to discover in the familiar universe seems to be no ordinary value, no mere fulfilment of the activity of a teleologically active substance. In some sense it is indifferent to, because it is superior to, the ordinary distinction between good and evil. In ecstasy we seem to appreciate the universe for being—just whatever we believe it in fact to be, whether for mind a place of triumph or of defeat. And, if my account is correct, the difference between this excellence of fact, or of fate, and the familiar teleological goods is most obvious in those moments of ecstasy which occur when we are being forced to surrender our most cherished ends. (d) Although there is this striking difference between the excellence cognized in ecstasy and all familiar goods, it is not true that in ecstasy we transcend the sphere of value altogether. In all the ecstatic experiences we do definitely value the universe, which is the total object of contemplation. We admire it, worship it ; and we do so because we judge it to be a value, not simply for us, but in and for itself. We are not disintoxicated from all values, but only from all values other than the intrinsic excellence of the universe. Nor, strictly, are we disintoxicated from any values ; for, though from our high look-out we can now regard all familiar values with complete detachment, we at the same time see them to be irradiated by the supreme excellence.

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  DISILLUSION AND ECSTASY 249 For it is essentially a standing outside oneself, and an aloofness from all the familiar objects of the will, a detach- ment not merely from the private person but equally from the world and its claims, not indeed to deny them, but to appreciate them with a new serenity. To speak almost in the same breath of detachment and of enhanced appre- ciativeness may seem inconsistent. But anyone who has ever attempted any work of art must understand this description. For it is only when we stand aloof from our work, that we most justly and most keenly appreciate whatever is good in it. Immersed no longer in the technical labour, with all its incidental but engrossing defeats and victories, we can value without distraction (and therefore with closer attention, and therefore more sharply), the aesthetic whole that we have devised. I do not mean merely that in ecstasy our private desires may come to be regarded as unimportant and contemptible compared with the needs (say) of mankind as a community of interdependent minds; somewhat as, within the individual’s private economy, momentary impulses may be regarded as less worthy of consideration than permanent and deep-seated dispositions. It is not this comparative evaluation of needs and their fulfilments that is in question. In this mood of ecstasy we seem in some manner to pass beyond the whole cramping, limiting distinction between good and bad ; we may even contemplate with a kind of cold fervour of acquiescence the possibility even that the - whole enterprise of mind in the cosmos should fail, that the richest capacity of the universal active substance should never achieve expression in the supreme level of organism, and that all that has hitherto been achieved should be lost. For in this mood not only victory but also defeat, even final catastrophe, is experienced as good. We seem to stand above the battle in which we ourselves are eager and hard-pressed fighters, and to admire it as a work of divine art, in which tragic aesthetic excellence over- whelmingly vindicates all the defeat and pain even of those who may never have access to this vision. Evidently if this account of ecstasy be true, we have

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  248 A MODERN THEORY OF ETHICS some dearest object of loyalty—it is perhaps in these situations that the precise content of the mood is best seen. It is possible, for instance, to be on the verge of panic, to be reduced to quivering incapacity and terror, and yet all the while to be an exultant onlooker, rapt in observation of the spectacle, yet in a queer way aloof. It is possible even in the compulsive reaction to pain in one’s own flesh, and even while helplessly watching a beloved’s pain, to be, precisely, in the very act of frantic revulsion, coldly, brilliantly, enlightened, not as to the excellence of pain, but as to the excellence of the universe. There seem to be two factors common to these experi- ences. They all involve the vigorous espousal of some need or other, great or small; and they are all experiences © of the defeat of the espoused need. They are all occasions of intense psychical activity, and all occasions of defeat. From unusually intense and thwarted desire we seem to wake, without any disillusionment from the ends at stake, into apprehension of value or excellence of an entirely different order. Not that we pierce beyond ulusory appearances to reality itself, or contemptuously turn from the shadow to the substance, but rather, as I have said, we appreciate something that was presented before but was hitherto beyond our appreciation. Not even that we ‘re-value’; for re-valuation implies some denial of the urgency of former values. Rather we prize these even more than formerly ; and, just because of this new appre- hension, just because experience of this other order of excellence irradiates even the familiar valuations that it transcends, we may be even more active in their defence than we were before our enlightenment. For, paradoxi- cally, the familiar values, even with their new poignancy, are perceived as members in that higher excellence which does indeed both eclipse them and enhance them. (c) EMANCIPATION FROM TELEOLOGY Well may we call this mood ecstasy, even though perhaps it is profoundly different from the ecstasy of the mystics.

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  250 A MODERN THEORY OF ETHICS come upon a very serious difficulty for an ethical theory according to which we mean by ‘ good’ simply fulfilment of activity or tendency. For if by ‘good’ we mean fulfilment, it is meaningless even to ask of a certain instance of ‘ good’ whether it is an instance of fulfilment or not. Let us, however, put aside this difficulty for the present, and pursue our empirical investigation of ecstasy. It is this radical difference between the familiar values and the value glimpsed in ecstasy that leads some to suppose that in ecstasy the distinction between good and bad is seen to be abolished. This I believe to be an error. Detachment from lower values for the sake of higher is mistaken for emancipation from value itself. There is, no doubt, a sense in which the spiritual life involves a ‘ disintoxication ’ from the influence of all values,! an aloofness even in the most exalted delights. But these negative phrases describe only the process of emancipation, not the end for the sake of which emancipation is attempted. And even so they misdescribe ; for there is nothing in them to distinguish ecstasy from disillusion, the somnolent failure to value at all from the awakening into a new mode of valuation and a new sphere of values, unnoticed in familiar moods. It is true that in ecstasy we have peace, and that we are indeed emancipated from all desire, and can accept whatever befalls. This, however, does not imply that we have transcended value, but rather that we have discovered, or seem to have discovered, that whatever befalls is good. We admire the issue of fate; we are not indifferent to it. Those who claim that the ‘spiritual life’ consists in an emancipation from value, admit that to the imperfectly spiritual the goal of spirituality constitutes a value, and the supreme value; but, they argue, the goal itself is a state in which value is seen to be illusory. In the spiritual view it matters not whether anyone attains to spirituality, still less whether the world’s enterprises succeed or fail. Therefore, we are told, in the spiritual view value is altogether escaped. But this is to overlook the fact, insisted upon often by the mystics themselves, and even 1G. Santayana, Platonism and the Spiritual Life, p. 30.

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A complete read of the book (not just the famous chapters) shows the 1934 lecture is a compression of the whole, not a later development. Chapter I already stages the lecture’s occasion: disillusion breeding substitute faiths — nationalism analysed as sham worship, war as “the supreme religious rite of sacrifice to their romantic god,” enlistment “in response to herd-suggestion — with no more loyalty than sheep who follow their leader” — under the diagnosis “an age of increasing scepticism is also an age of increasing fanaticism.” Chapter III already derives worship from the object rather than the worshipper: “we ought not, and indeed we cannot, worship in order to fulfil ourselves” (with the instant trademark hedge, “Perhaps this is mere superstition”). Chapter VIII contains the finished anti-Freud weapon, the Joan of Arc set-piece, which multiplies rival reductions (Freud, Adler, herd instinct, thwarted parenthood) until “their very plausibility should make us suspect that no one of them is the truth.” And the real discovery is chapter XIII, “Reality and Admiration” — the unread bridge from ethics to the numinous, where nature-admiration divides into aesthetic and a second kind that “might be called religious,” located exactly where the lecture locates it, “in our admiration of the star-strewn sky,” where “we may have an overwhelming sense that we are confronted by the very face of nature.” The lecture’s verb is already there: “We salute them for being, whatever their form, veritable features of the face of reality.”

One divergence is instructive: the 1929 book still asserts doctrine — “since this supreme excellence presents itself as claiming our worship, we are under obligation to worship it,” and even that admiration metaphysically fulfils the object. The 1934 lecture keeps the experience and the book’s own “strict agnosticism” while renouncing the obligation-claim — practising the abstinence the book only preached. What the lecture adds beyond that is Otto’s word numinous and the situation of 1934: the argument now has to survive not just G. E. Moore’s objections but Freud’s, Marx’s, and Mussolini’s.

An unpublished typescript from the same workbench — “Thoughts on the Modern Spirit” (c. 1928, never printed in his lifetime; recovered July 2026 via the Crossley Reader) — shows how deliberately the lecture’s cultural argument was designed. It maps the aftermath of the science-versus-romance conflict into four movements: romantic retreat; “romance reformed,” the militant faith in Life and Man (Meredith, Shaw, Wells — precisely the lecture’s humanism, already diagnosed as “the modern, popular, and social-democratic form of Calvinism”); disillusion; and a fourth mood of “disinterested admiration.” Six years before South Place the vocabulary is fixed: the mood is to be understood “not as doubtful evidence that ‘God is on our side’… but as a spontaneous salutation”; its adepts “crouch before the serpent of eternity not in horror merely, but in ecstasy”; they “suddenly fall in love with [the world], fall into worship of it, admire in it a severity incomparably more desirable than the sweetness they had demanded of it”; and man’s office is “to strive toward ever clearer percipience… always for the end which our fathers called worship.” Even the lecture’s tonal discovery — that the salute must survive humour — is here: “Without bitterness, and with no need for shame, we can deride the thing we most adore.” And the essay states, more nakedly than anywhere else in the corpus, the biographical route in: the modern religious experience “is itself the unexpected outcome of disillusion. Only by way of despair and a subsequent detachment can we attain this experience in its purity, and distinguish it from the mere conviction that the heavens care for us.”

3.3 Last and First Men (1930): the ideal narrated

The novel, published four years before the lecture, is the lecture’s content run as a two-billion-year simulation:

• The four hypothetical worlds of sheet 10 are the novel’s civilizations: the mediocre world fully satisfied (the Third Men’s placid ages and, satirically, Gordelpus-worshipping First-Men America — lowbrow humanism become religion, “the greatest happiness” as sacred flight and dance); the aristocratic-slave world; and finally, in the Last Men, something like the hierarchical-yet-communal fourth option.
• The Preface announces the lecture’s method: “to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values” — and chapter I’s history of religion is the lecture’s dialectic: Socrates (dispassionate intelligence) and Jesus (self-oblivious worship) as the two ideals, and the early “admiration for Fate” in Greek tragedy and Hebrew worship producing “that vision of an alien and supernal beauty which was to exalt and perplex [man] again and again throughout his whole career. The conflict between this worship and the intransigent loyalty to Life, embattled against Death, proved insoluble.” That sentence — the far-future narrator’s verdict on the First Men — is the lecture’s thesis statement, four years early.
  Last and First Men (1930) ↗ · ¶ 5 · ¶ 38 — quoted passages in context

  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.

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  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.

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• And the novel’s famous ending is the lecture’s superhumanism given a dying voice: “Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them… The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard. Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction… It is very good to have been man.” The Last Men facing extinction perform exactly the double loyalty of sheet 28: unswerving practical service (they seed the future with the “dissemination”) and the salute to the Whole that destroys them. Though the novel audits even its own climax: the same speech concedes that man “can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard,” and its final affirmation is defiantly anthropocentric — “Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme.” The salute is performed and questioned in the same breath.
  Last and First Men (1930) ↗ · ¶ 741 · ¶ 742–743 — quoted passages in context

  Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.

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  Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling's knowledge. His admiration is a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard.

  Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him. But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness. But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.

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• The scaffolding itself has a documented seed, now on the shelf (§4): Crossley records that Haldane’s “The Last Judgment” (Possible Worlds, 1927; acquired 1928, during composition) “had a far greater impact on the decision to extend the book” beyond its first outline than any other text — “a cornucopia of unelaborated but provocative guesses and fancies about the future, around many of which Olaf built entire episodes.” The held texts let the walk be made, and the sharpest print is a displacement: Haldane’s catastrophe is tidal power run to the limit (“The tides were therefore employed, and gradually became the main source of energy”) until the moon falls, where the novel splits the guess in two — the First Men refuse tidal power “because, since tidal motion was so obviously astronomical in origin, it had come to be regarded as sacred,” and it is a later species whose “unbridled waste of tidal energy was enough to interfere appreciably with the orbit of the moon.” Influence and correction in one gesture — the same relation the lecture’s superhumanism bears to the essay’s Venusian race-organism (§4).
  Crossley, Speaking for the Future (1994) ↗ · ¶ 808 — quoted passage in context

  More recent works also made an impact. In 1923, Stapledon read Wells's *Outline of History* and in 1927 J. W. Dunne's *Experiment in Time*, the first a model of synoptic and generalizing history and the second an investigation of telepathy that challenged the commonsense metaphor of time's arrow. He also read Gerald Heard's *Ascent of Humanity*, but found its notions of psychological evolution unreliable. An essay acquired in 1928, during the early phase of *Last and First Men*'s composition, had a far greater impact on the decision to extend the book beyond the relatively modest confines of the outline in “The Future Speaks”: J. B. S. Haldane's “The Last Judgment.” Haldane's speculative apocalypse is a cornucopia of unelaborated but provocative guesses and fancies about the future, around many of which Olaf built entire episodes—the depletion of fossil fuels and the destruction of the earth by its disintegrating moon, the development of new human senses and the abolition of pain through eugenic manipulation, the terraforming of Venus and the fashioning of a stumpy dwarf humanity to colonize Jupiter.[24]

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  Haldane, Possible Worlds (1927) ↗ · ¶ 641 — quoted passage in context

  ‘At this time the effect of tidal friction was to make each century, measured in days, just under a second shorter than the last. The friction occurred mainly in the Bering Sea between northern Asia and America. As soon as the use of heat engines was discovered, man began to oxidize the fossil vegetables to be found under the earth’s surface. After a few centuries they gave out, and other sources of energy were employed. The power available from fresh water was small, from winds intermittent, and that from the sun’s heat only available with ease in the tropics. The tides were therefore employed, and gradually became the main source of energy. The invention of synthetic food led to a great increase in the world’s population, and after the federation of the world it settled down at about twelve thousand million. As tide engines were developed, an ever-increasing use was made of their power; and before the human race had been in existence for a million years, the tide-power utilized aggregated a million million horse-power. The braking action of the tides was increased fiftyfold, and the day began to lengthen appreciably.

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  Last and First Men (1930) ↗ · ¶ 195 · ¶ 442 — quoted passages in context

  Much of the power needed to keep this civilization in being was drawn from the buried remains of prehistoric vegetation, in the form of coal. Although after the foundation of the World State the fuel of Antarctica had been very carefully husbanded, the new supply of oil had given out in less than three centuries, and men were forced to drive their aeroplanes by electricity generated from coal. It soon became evident, however, that even the unexpectedly rich coal-fields of Antarctica would not last for ever. The cessation of oil had taught men a much needed lesson, had made them feel the reality of the power problem. At the same time the cosmopolitan spirit, which was learning to regard the whole race as compatriots, was also beginning to take a broader view temporally, and to see things with the eyes of remote generations. During the first and sanest thousand years of the World State, there was a widespread determination not to incur the blame of the future by wasting power. Thus not only was there serious economy (the first large-scale cosmopolitan enterprise), but also efforts were made to utilize more permanent sources of power. Wind was used extensively. On every building swarms of windmills generated electricity, and every mountain range was similarly decorated, while every considerable fall of water forced its way through turbines. More important still was the utilization of power derived from volcanos and from borings into the subterranean heat. This, it had been hoped, would solve the whole problem of power, once and for all. But even in the earlier and more intelligent period of the World State inventive genius was not what it had been, and no really satisfactory method was found. Consequently at no stage of this civilization did volcanic sources do more than supplement the amazingly rich coal seams of Antarctica. In this region coal was preserved at far greater depths than elsewhere, because, by some accident, the earth's central heat was not here fierce enough (as it was elsewhere) to turn the deeper beds into graphite. Another possible source of power was known to exist in the ocean tides; but the use of this was forbidden by the S.O.S. because, since tidal motion was so obviously astronomical in origin, it had come to be regarded as sacred.

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  […] Once, early in the history of the species, and before its nature had become fixed, there occurred a non-industrial civilization of a genuinely intellectual kind, almost like that of Greece. Sometimes, but not often, the third human species fooled itself into an extravagantly industrial world civilization, in the manner of the Americanized First Men. In general its interest was too much concerned with other matters to become entangled with mechanical devices. But on three occasions at least it succumbed. Of these civilizations one derived its main power from wind and falling water, one from the tides, one from the earth's internal heat. The first, saved from the worst evils of industrialism by the limitations of its power, lasted some hundred thousand years in barren equilibrium, until it was destroyed by an obscure bacterium. The second was fortunately brief; but its fifty thousand years of unbridled waste of tidal energy was enough to interfere appreciably with the orbit of the moon. This world-order collapsed at length in a series of industrial wars. The third endured a quarter of a million years as a brilliantly sane and efficient world organization. Throughout most of its existence there was almost complete social harmony with scarcely as much internal strife as occurs in a bee-hive. But once more civilization came at length to grief, this time through the misguided effort to breed special human types for specialized industrial pursuits. Industrialism, however, was never more than a digression, a lengthy and disastrous irrelevance in the life of this species. There were other digressions. There were for instance cultures, enduring sometimes for several thousand years, which were predominantly musical. This could never have occurred among the First Men; but, as was said, the third species was peculiarly […]

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A full read of the novel’s long middle shows the conflict is not merely announced in chapter I and resolved at the end — it is tested species by species, and several of the tests supply arguments the lecture compresses:

• The Patagonian Divine Boy is the salute in its most joyous register — he slaps the ugly idol and cries “Ugly, I salute you! Not as almighty, but as the greatest of all jokers,” and his gospel is the lecture’s practice-test avant la lettre: “we strain every muscle to win; but all the while we care less for winning than for the game.”
  Last and First Men (1930) ↗ · ¶ 253 · ¶ 254 — quoted passages in context

  The climax came when, during a ceremony in the supreme temple of the capital city, while the worshippers were all prostrated before the hideous image of the Creator, the ageless prophet strode up to the altar, regarded first the congregation and then the god, burst into a hearty peal of laughter, slapped the image resoundingly, and cried, "Ugly, I salute you! Not as almighty, but as the greatest of all jokers. To have such a face, and yet to be admired for it! To be so empty, and yet so feared!" Instantly there was a hubbub. But such was the young iconoclast's god-like radiance, confidence, unexpectedness, and such his reputation as the miraculous Boy, that when he turned upon the crowd, they fell silent, and listened to his scolding.

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  "Fools!" he cried. "Senile infants! If God really likes your adulation, and all this hugger-mugger, it is because he enjoys the joke against you, and against himself, too. You are too serious, yet not serious enough; too solemn, and all for puerile ends. You are so eager for life, that you cannot live. You cherish your youth so much that it flies from you. When I was a boy, I said, 'Let us keep young'; and you applauded, and went about hugging your toys and refusing to grow up. What I said was not bad for a boy, but it was not enough. Now I am a man; and I say, 'For God's sake, grow up!" Of course we must keep young; but it is useless to keep young if we do not also grow up, and never stop growing up. To keep young, surely, is just to keep supple and keen; and to grow up is not at all a mere sinking into stiffness and into disillusion, but a rising into ever finer skill in all the actions of the game of living. There is something else, too, which is a part of growing up––to see that life is really, after all, a game; a terribly serious game, no doubt, but none the less a game. When we play a game, as it should be played, we strain every muscle to win; but all the while we care less for winning than for the game. And we play the better for it. When barbarians play against a Patagonian team, they forget that it is a game, and go mad for victory. And then how we despise them! If they find themselves losing, they turn savage; if winning, blatant. Either way, the game is murdered, and they cannot see that they are slaughtering a lovely thing. How they pester and curse the umpire, too! I have done that myself, of course, before now; not in games but in life. I have actually cursed the umpire of life. Better so, anyhow, than to insult him with presents, in the hope of being favoured; which is what you are doing here, with your salaams and your vows. I never did that. I merely hated him. Then later I learned to laugh at him, or rather at the thing you set up in his place. But now at last I see him clearly, and laugh with him, at myself, for having missed the spirit of the game. But as for you! Coming here to fawn and whine and cadge favours of the umpire!"

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• The Second Men die of the lecture’s central failure: under the Martian onslaught “they had determined to see their own racial tragedy as a thing of beauty, and they had failed” — which the narrator calls “the supreme crux of existence.” Claiming the vision before one has it is fatal: the case for “no doctrine,” run as a species-scale experiment (the text stretches the decline across the whole Martian era, giving no clean span).
  Last and First Men (1930) ↗ · ¶ 412 · ¶ 413 — quoted passages in context

  It is almost impossible to describe in a few words the subtle malady of the spirit that was undermining the Second Men. To say that they were suffering from an inferiority complex, would not be wholly false, but it would be a misleading vulgarization of the truth. To say that they had lost faith, both in themselves and in the universe, would be almost as inadequate. Crudely stated, their trouble was that, as a species, they had attempted a certain spiritual feat beyond the scope of their still-primitive filature. Spiritually they had over-reached themselves, broken every muscle (so to speak) and incapacitated themselves for any further effort. For they had determined to see their own racial tragedy as a thing of beauty, and they had failed. It was the obscure sense of this defeat that had poisoned them, for, being in many respects a very noble species, they could not simply turn their backs upon their failure and pursue the old way of life with the accustomed zest and thoroughness.

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  During the earliest Martian raids, the spiritual leaders of humanity had preached that the disaster must be an occasion for a supreme religious experience. While striving mightily to save their civilization, men must yet (so it was said) learn not merely to endure, but to admire, even the sternest issue. "Thus and thus is the world. Seeing the depth, we shall see also the height, and praise both." The whole population had accepted this advice. At first they had seemed to succeed. Many noble literary expressions were given forth, which seemed to define and elaborate, and even actually to create in men's hearts, this supreme experience. But as the centuries passed and the disasters were repeated, men began to fear that their forefathers had deceived themselves. Those remote generations had earnestly longed to feel the racial tragedy as a factor in the cosmic beauty; and at last they had persuaded themselves that this experience had actually befallen them. But their descendants were slowly coming to suspect that no such experience had ever occurred, that it would never occur to any man, and that there was in fact no such cosmic beauty to be experienced. The First Men would probably, in such a situation, have swung violently either into spiritual nihilism, or else into some comforting religious myth. At any rate, they were of too coarse-grained a nature to be ruined by a trouble so impalpable. Not so the Second Men. For they realized all too clearly that they were faced with the supreme crux of existence. And so, age after age the generations clung desperately to the hope that, if only they could endure a little longer, the light would break in on them. Even after the Martian colony had been three times established and destroyed by the orthodox race in Mars, the supreme preoccupation of the human species was with this religious crux. But afterwards, and very gradually, they lost heart. For it was borne in on them that either they themselves were by nature too obtuse to perceive this ultimate excellence of things (an excellence which they had strong reason to believe in intellectually, although they could not actually experience it), or the human race had utterly deceived itself, and the course of cosmic events after all was not significant, but a meaningless rigmarole.

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• The Martians are herd-worship on another world — a group mind whose “superb loyalty… was squandered upon something which was not greater than themselves in mental calibre, but only in mere bulk.” Sheet 25’s warning, with a planet for a congregation.
  Last and First Men (1930) ↗ · ¶ 379 — quoted passage in context

  This would not have been amiss, had the mind of the race, into which he so frequently awoke under the influence of the general radiation, been indeed a mind of higher rank than his own. But it was not. It was but a pooling of the percipience and thought and will of the cloudlets. Thus it was that the superb loyalty of the Martians was squandered upon something which was not greater than themselves in mental calibre, but only in mere bulk.

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• The Fifth Men practise “that intelligent worship which, they felt, [the universe] demanded” — and then commit the Venus genocide “without hate; indeed, rather in love,” their detachment gathering aesthetic “insight” as the navy kills. This is the salute’s ethical shadow, which the lecture’s insistence on unswerving human loyalty exists to forbid.
  Last and First Men (1930) ↗ · ¶ 528 · ¶ 562 — quoted passages in context

  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 longlived 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.

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  On the other hand a very different mood sometimes sprang from the same three sources. After all, the failure of science was a challenge to be gladly accepted; it opened up a wealth of possibilities hitherto unimagined. Even the unalterable distress of the past constituted a challenge; for in some strange manner the present and future, it was said, must transfigure the past. As for the murder of Venerian life, it was, indeed, terrible, but right. It had been committed without hate; indeed, rather in love. For as the navy proceeded with its relentless work, it had gathered much insight into the life of the natives, and had learned to admire, even in a sense to love, while it killed. This mood, of inexorable yet not ruthless will, intensified the spiritual sensibility of the species, refined, so to speak, its spiritual hearing, and revealed to it tones and themes in the universal music which were hitherto obscure.

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• And the Epilogue quietly revokes the consolation: the dying Last Men “have gradually lost not only the ecstasy of dispassionate worship, but even the capacity for normal disinterested behaviour.” The famous “It is very good to have been man” is spoken by one exceptional youth to a Brotherhood that can no longer see the vision. Stapledon knew from the start that the salute is fragile, revocable, and dangerous — which is why the 1934 lecture hedges it with scepticism and tests it by conduct.
  Last and First Men (1930) ↗ · ¶ 731 — quoted passage in context

  Degeneration of the higher neural centres has also brought about in us a far more serious and deep-seated trouble, namely a general spiritual degradation which would formerly have seemed impossible, so confident were we of our integrity. The perfectly dispassionate will had been for many millions of years universal among us, and the corner-stone of our whole society and culture. We had almost forgotten that it has a physiological basis, and that if that basis were undermined, we might no longer be capable of rational conduct. But, drenched for some thousands of years by the unique stellar radiation, we have gradually lost not only the ecstasy of dispassionate worship, but even the capacity for normal disinterested behaviour. Every one is now liable to an irrational bias in favour of himself as a private person, as against his fellows. Personal envy, uncharitableness, even murder and gratuitous cruelty, formerly unknown amongst us, are now becoming common. At first when men began to notice in themselves these archaic impulses, they crushed them with amused contempt. But as the highest nerve centres fell further into decay, the brute in us began to be ever more unruly, and the human more uncertain. Rational conduct was henceforth to be achieved only after an exhausting and degrading "moral struggle," instead of spontaneously and fluently. Nay, worse, increasingly often the struggle ended not in victory but defeat. Imagine then, the terror and disgust that gripped us when we found ourselves one and all condemned to a desperate struggle against impulses which we had been accustomed to regard as insane. It is distressing enough to know that each one of us might at any moment, merely to help some dear individual or other, betray his supreme duty toward the dissemination; but it is harrowing to discover ourselves sometimes so far sunk as to be incapable even of common loving-kindness toward our neighbours. For a man to favour himself against his friend or beloved, even in the slightest respect, was formerly unknown. But today many of us are haunted by the look of amazed horror and pity in the eyes of an injured friend.

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3.4 Last Men in London (1932): the argument as autobiography

The novel Stapledon published two years before the lecture — the Last and First Men sequel in which a far-future Neptunian observer inhabits the mind of an ordinary Englishman, Paul — turns out to stage the lecture’s central battle as a life-story, and it supplies the lecture’s most important word.

The chapter “Paul Devout” dramatizes both sides of the lecture’s Freudian duel at once. Paul, converted by a charismatic priest, has an overwhelming experience of the God of Love: “the whole universe… was manifestly infused with the divine love.” The Neptunian narrator then performs, from inside Paul’s own head, exactly the reduction the lecture will confront at South Place: the “strange familiarity and the delicious consolation” of the vision “were after all but an echo of his own obscure yearning for the tenderness of the breast and the elysium of the womb.” And in the same chapter stands the austere alternative: the Neptunian himself, “who found in this event, and in all existence, overmastering beauty indeed, but for the love-sick human individual no consolation” — and the shrewd diagnosis that the priest’s genuine vision had “another and more austere feature… which he never dared fully to acknowledge, even to himself, since in terms of his own religious dogma it appeared starkly as a vision of superhuman inhumanity.” The lecture’s whole second half is compressed in that sentence. (The novel even ironizes Stapledon’s own juvenilia: Paul’s devout free verse “MEN” is a lightly rewritten psalm from Latter-Day Psalms — the 1914 book demoted to a stage of spiritual adolescence.)

The war chapters, too, are now confirmed as barely-veiled autobiography by the letters: the episode Stapledon calls Paul’s “nadir of existence” — the ambulance driver who leaves a smashed man in a ditch under shellfire, believing him dead — happened to Stapledon himself on the Marne front in July 1918, and his letter confessing it to Agnes (“I shall remember that man now for many a long day… Can you forgive me?”) is one of the rawest things he ever wrote. The lecture’s insistence that the salute must coexist with, not replace, the “claims of altruism” was not armchair doctrine; he knew exactly what it felt like when practical loyalty failed.

And in “London and the Spirit,” Paul’s mature epiphany, the lecture’s signature verb appears as personal lyric. Paul’s culminating poem begins: “When a man salutes the perfection of reality / Peace invades him” — and immediately doubts itself in the lecture’s own sceptical voice: “Was the task illusory? Is this beatitude but the complacency of self-expansion?” The verb was already in print — the 1929 Ethics’s “We salute them for being… veritable features of the face of reality”, the Divine Boy’s “Ugly, I salute you!” (1930) — and by 1932 it had become his settled term of art; the 1934 manuscript’s “I salute though it destroy me” is not a phrase found for the occasion. The same chapter contains the “music that spirit is” doctrine — “There is no music without the torture of the strings” — which is the lecture’s tragic aesthetics; Last and First Men had closed on the same figure (“Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme”), and this novel names the tune again: “a fair end to the brief music that is man.”

A full read of the novel shows something stronger still: the lecture’s exact thesis, stated as a thesis, two years early. The Neptunian’s final verdict on Paul is that he apprehended “the two supreme and seemingly discordant offices of the individual mind, namely, loyalty to man and worship of fate. To the Last Men these offices are displayed as organic to one another; but to the First Men, they are for ever discrepant” (ch. 8). The war-origins chapter had already named them “these two seemingly incompatible divine commandments of the future.” That is the South Place lecture in one sentence — with the crucial admission that for beings like us the two loyalties never quite fuse, which is why the lecture can only counsel holding both. And the book stress-tests the salute where it hurts most: inhabiting a German soldier dying in agony, the serene far-future observer himself nearly apostatizes — “a universe in which such torture could occur must be utterly vile, and… the Neptunian complacency was heartless.” Even the imagined perfected worshipper wobbles inside Hell. The lecture’s refusal to promise that the salute is easy, or always available, is the honesty of a man who had written that scene.

3.5 Waking World (1934): the lecture in book form

The decisive external witness — identified after the first draft of this analysis — is Waking World, the popular philosophy book Stapledon published in the very year of the lecture. Its opening chapter (“The Scope of This Book”) contains a section headed, literally, “Humanism and Superhumanism,” announcing the book’s project in the lecture’s exact terms: “many human beings crave more than the satisfaction which is afforded by humanism even in its most developed and comprehensive form… they feel an impulse of admiration, or of piety, toward something other than man… It is as unscientific to belittle this impulse as it is to make it an excuse for superstition.” And in the preface he flags the book’s chapter XIII as “the only part of my book which can make any claim to originality” — a claim to novelty the lecture itself never quite makes; its synopsis claims only “dissatisfaction with both.”

Chapter XIII, “Man and Fate,” is the lecture’s second half written out in full prose:

• “Worship, in the strict sense, can be given only to something superhuman… If there is nothing of such a kind, then there is nothing fit to be worshipped.” And the anti-narcissism argument in its sharpest published form: “to worship mankind is only to worship ourselves… Even to worship a loving God is really to worship our own nature made perfect… That is just where the trouble lies.”
  Waking World (1934) ↗ · ¶ 264 · ¶ 266 — quoted passages in context

  of the human mind, I agree that in this sense we should ‘worship’ humanity. But for some of us this is not what worship means. We cannot worship humanity, simply as humanity. We can, I think, in an important sense be loyal to, or even love, mankind. But worship, in the strict sense, can be given only to something superhuman, something conceived as altogether of a higher order than ourselves, or than the most excellent of our fellow men. If there is nothing of such a kind, then there is nothing fit to be worshipped, nothing fit to be regarded with that very special and intense kind of admiration which worship is. There is, indeed, one sense in which we may worship humanity. We may worship it either as a part of, or an expression of, something more than humanity, something in essence superhuman. Some of those who profess to take humanity as their highest object of loyalty do, I think, unwittingly regard humanity in this way. Others do not. They merely feel kindliness and pity or admiration for their fellow men. Let us consider in more detail what ‘worship’ of humanity involves. The starting-point is sheer ‘love of mankind’. Now loving involves knowing the object of your love. Even though you may not be able to describe it, you must, in some sense, know it. You cannot love an individual human person unless you know something of him or her, unless you have a lively vision of him or her as a unique experiencing individual; and you cannot love mankind unless you know something of mankind. Still less can you worship it as having superhuman significance, unless you know something about it as a whole pattern of lives, unless you have a lively vision of it, not simply as a crowd of persons but as a world-wide adventuring host whose career is age-long. You must think of the persons that together make up mankind not merely as little selves, longing for all sorts of private joys and on the whole making a sad muddle of their lives, but as, each one of them, a pioneer in

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  conceived in this way, should be the one object of our loyalty. He may perhaps even feel that what matters most in the universe is this age-long adventure of waking into the most clear-sighted and large-hearted aliveness, of waking into the full, the true ‘humanity’, whether this is to be achieved by our own species or by beings alien to ourselves in remote parts of the universe. Yet there is something else to take into account, something more difficult to describe. The worship of mankind or, as I would rather call it, loyalty in the human enterprise, is indeed part of the true and wholly satisfying and most alive kind of worship; and Christian love of our fellow men is also part of it. But I at least cannot feel that love of our fellows and loyalty in the great adventure of mankind together make up the whole of religion. For, after all, to worship mankind is only to worship ourselves. For mankind is nothing but all of us together, striving in our different ways to make the best of life. Indeed, even to worship a loving God is really to worship our own nature made perfect. All the characters which are attributed to a benevolent and almighty and omniscient deity are idealizations of the distinctively human capacities. That is just where the trouble lies. We are so easily trapped into thinking that our own nature, perfected, is the finest thing there is, or can be. When a man is in the mood of unqualified loyalty to mankind, the thought may occur to him that, sooner or later, even if men do succeed at last in making the really splendid human world which at present we can only dimly imagine, that world will almost certainly be destroyed. There are many ways in which it might come to an end, but one way, if the others are avoided, seems almost inevitable. Our sun will cool, and his planets will be frozen. Even if men were to escape from the solar system, which is unlikely, wherever they were to go, they would be faced sooner or later with a

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• The lecture’s refusal of personal theism, verbatim in spirit: “Probably to say, ‘There is God’, and to say, ‘There is no God’… are all equally false; so unreliable is our thinking.”
  Waking World (1934) ↗ · ¶ 275 — quoted passage in context

  entirely careless of ourselves, and of mankind, save as instruments of worship. We do not worship it for being in any sense like ourselves, or friendly towards us, but for being itself. We may sometimes have a strong sense that it is alive, and infinitely more alive, more splendidly alive, than we ourselves. It may indeed be so. But how can we possibly know? Probably to say, ‘There is God’, and to say, ‘There is no God’, and again to say, ‘The Whole is a living conscious Whole’, and to say, ‘It is not so’, are all equally false; so unreliable is our thinking. But what matter? In the mood which I am describing we feel, strangely, that whatever is in fact the truth about the universe, that must somehow be the best possible, even if we are too stupid to explain how it can be so. It is important to realize that in this experience, which seems to me the essence of the religious experience, there is, first, direct apprehension of some particular event or situation, great or minute. This objective situation presents itself as having a character to which the appropriate response is worship. But this worshipful character, though given in the particular event, does seem in some sense to be significant of very much more than the particular event. Even if it is not a window through which we see the Whole, it is, or seems to be, a window through which we see far more than the particular perceived or conceived event. But what that ‘more’ really is we cannot say. If the foregoing account is correct, we may say that religion is a mental or spiritual attitude of admiration, or praise, or worship, of a unique beauty and significance which may be discovered in or through any shred of existence, and in the whole of existence experienced by man. It is the ecstatic apprehension of a kind of beauty or rightness which may be called ‘superhuman’, in the sense that it is alien to, and superior to, every human

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• The “sceptical protests” section rehearses and answers exactly the lecture’s Freudian attack (projection, grovelling-instinct, repressed cruelty), with the same reply: “the experience to be explained seems to be so much richer, more subtle, more awakened, than any of the impulses that are offered as its explanation.”
  Waking World (1934) ↗ · ¶ 280 — quoted passage in context

  or before the idea of some God. A more sinister explanation is possible. In all of us there are deep-laid impulses of cruelty. Civilization forbids us to satisfy these impulses fully and frankly. And because they are thus repressed, they afford us an overwhelming and bewildered delight when we contemplate the cruelty of the universe. There are many other ways in which our sense of the beauty of existence may be explained and explained away. All these explanations are at bottom the same. They consist in saying that we do not really delight in the universe, or in existence, at all, but in the fulfilling of some impulse or need of our own; and that we mistake our sense of personal well-being for a sense of the beauty of the world. But can this kind of explanation be true? As was said in another connexion, the experience to be explained seems to be so much richer, more subtle, more awakened, than any of the impulses that are offered as its explanation, or than all of them together. Yet in our present state of ignorance and confusion we cannot but allow that some such explanation may, after all, be the true one. Of course, to any one who has actually experienced existence in the religious way these plausible psychological explanations all seem far-fetched, almost comic, almost as fantastic as it would be to explain a picture by giving an account of the food which the artist had eaten every day since his birth. He cannot but question whether the psychologist really comprehends the kind of thing that he is undertaking to explain. Are we really such fools that we mistake the fulfilment of primitive impulse for delight in the universe, or in objective existence? In this experience we do indeed feel a great surge of vitality in ourselves, but we seem able to distinguish quite clearly between our own aliveness and the beauty with which we are confronted. And again, though we do indeed want to bow down before this greatness, we do not worship for the mere satisfaction of grovelling. It is no more true (and no less) to

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• The salute appears as doctrine: the tragic play watched “as a play”; the parable of the bird above the burning forest, accepting “with peace, and even with ecstasy, the possibility that he may presently sink and be destroyed”; and the fusion of worship with militancy — “Ecstatic acceptance, in the depth of one’s own being, demands in the life of action absolute devotion to the cause of the militant spirit,” with Jesus, Buddha and Spinoza as the exemplars.
  Waking World (1934) ↗ · ¶ 269 · ¶ 272–273 · ¶ 284 — quoted passages in context

  B. THE ANALOGY OF ART AS WAS NOTED in the chapter on art, the spectator at a stage play may find himself feeling in two very different ways about the play. The first is this. He sympathizes with the hero, and the heroine, and all the persons who are ‘on the right side and he wishes them to be successful in their enterprises. When their enemies succeed in thwarting them, he is indignant. If it is a tragic play, and in the end the hero comes to grief, he longs for a more cheerful ending. He wants to be told that the hero ‘lived happily ever after’. We all know this mood of sympathy with the ‘good’ characters of a play. The other way of feeling about a play is not so common, and not so easy. In this mood, though the spectator sympathizes with the hero, and indeed with all the characters, he cares most about the play as a play. I do not mean that he is interested to see how far and in what manner it fulfils the formal principles of dramatic art, but that he feels the play as a whole. If the spirit of the play is tragic, he wants it to fulfil its tragic nature. Although at the same time he grieves for the suffering persons, he delights in the terrible relentless way in which the opening situation of the play develops into the final tragedy. He recognizes that if this play had ended happily after all, it would not have been true to itself. Now even towards the human race and its great story, a man may feel in these two different ways. Sometimes he may feel sympathy alone, just the longing that the life of mankind may be always happy and triumphant, and have no tragic end. But sometimes he may feel himself rising above this sympathy, and finding a strange and deep delight in the great story which

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  and is permitted by the all-loving God; but in the Christian theory our suffering is only compatible with that perfection and with God’s goodness if, in some manner, however indirect, we are compensated for it. This seems to me a wholly unjustified and, indeed, irreligious, qualification. It is one which follows inevitably from the attempt to think of the object of worship in terms of human personality. For if God is a person, he must be judged by the standards of human morality; and if he permits suffering to go unrecompensed, he must be condemned. When any one suffers pain or sorrow, he feels most often that the thing which has befallen him is simply bad, hideous. And yet there is a certain mood in which he may find himself strangely rising above his own suffering, and delighting in its very painfulness, or rather in the whole situation within which his pain is a part. This he can only do while he is mentally very alert and sensitive; and unfortunately the pain itself is likely to cripple his mind; so that if it increases beyond a certain point he loses this strange insight, and becomes simply a tortured animal. Think of a bird living in a forest of great trees. Imagine that the forest catches fire. The bird is forced by the flames to soar up out of his familiar world of leaves and branches into a greater world above the tree-tops, a world of sky and space and distant mountains, a world whose floor is the burning tree-tops. Let us pretend that, when our symbolical bird finds himself under the sky with the burning forest beneath him, he suddenly wakes up to be more than a bird, and to his own surprise finds this new world very beautiful, with its wide sky, its floor of burning forest, and his own fluttering terrified self in the midst of it all. If the flames are too fierce, if they reach up too high, the bird is caught by them, and his feathers are burnt, so that he drops out of the new world into the fire. But so long as he actually maintains himself in the upper world, he can somehow accept with

  peace, and even with ecstasy, the possibility that he may presently sink and be destroyed. In this parable, then, the bird stands for a human mind, and the flames are pain and sorrow. Some birds are stronger fliers than others and (let us suppose) can rise above flames which would have caught the weaker fliers. Some minds are more able than others to rise above their pain and sorrow. Many, perhaps, can never even reach the tree-tops, never for a moment escape into that vaster world. Some merely glimpse it before they collapse. Some, like great eagles, can rise above the most terrible agonies and griefs; but probably for each one there is a point beyond which he cannot go, at which he is caught by the flames, so that he drops headlong into his pain, and loses all vision of that strange celestial beauty. It is not only in pain that a man may have that vision. It comes, no doubt, as often in joy. The bird, let us say, may soar above the tree-tops for very joy of life, or to sing to its mate. But if the vision, which is itself joyful, comes in the course of ordinary joyful diving, it is likely to be confused with the more familiar joy. If it comes in pain, it stands out clearly by contrast. The sufferer notices that, though he is feeling pain, he is also, surprisingly, feeling a strange, a dreadful delight in the beauty of the universe which includes both pleasure and pain; or perhaps I should say, in order to avoid implications about the whole of things, simply the beauty of his experienced world, with all its actuality of victory and defeat. Now it seems to me that this way of feeling, which I can only describe as a sense of the severe beauty or rightness of existence, is a part at least of what men call religion. It may come during our personal pain or during our personal joy, or it may come when we are thinking of mankind, or when we are deliberately trying to see the pattern of the whole within which mankind is one small happening. It may come through the realization of the aliveness

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  breed in conduct its very opposite, the emphatic resistance of evil, the will to take part effectively and without capitulation in the endless struggle for the awakening of the spirit in each individual and in the world as a whole, the will to fight for the truly human against the brutish, for life against death, for right against wrong. Let us always remember that these two attitudes of mind, which seem to our half-formed intelligence to be logically in conflict, can in practice be mutually supporting. Ecstatic acceptance, in the depth of one’s own being, demands in the life of action absolute devotion to the cause of the militant spirit. If examples are needed in support of this contention, the lives of Jesus and of Gautama Buddha may be cited as the supreme illustrations of the unity of acceptance and moral action. Nearer our own time we find the philosopher Spinoza exemplifying with strange perfection in his own life the union of courageous moral action and ecstatic acceptance, or, as he called it, ‘the intellectual love of God’. In our modern age the great common goal of all moral action must be, in some sense, revolution, world-revolution. The awakened mind has somehow to achieve at once both acceptance and the zeal of the revolutionary. In so far as a man falls short of acceptance, his zeal becomes fanatical, doctrinaire, callous, blind, and in the last resort inadequate to the needs of world-revolution. In so far as he fails in courage and loyalty to the revolutionary cause, the religious ecstasy of his acceptance is poisoned. This is perhaps a mystery, but it is true. OceanofPDF.com

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Yet the book’s discipline is looser than the lecture’s, in both directions. Immediately after the “equally false” verdict, chapter XIII allows itself the consolation the lecture forbids: “But what matter? In the mood which I am describing we feel, strangely, that whatever is in fact the truth about the universe, that must somehow be the best possible, even if we are too stupid to explain how it can be so” — a doctrine-shaped feeling (sheet 28’s forbidden “therefore all is well”) surviving in the very book that states the position. In the militant direction, chapter XIV makes “revolution, world-revolution” the “great common goal of all moral action,” where the lecture only half-concedes the quietist’s “all hands to the pumps” objection. And on the central contradiction the book is franker than the platform: “We cannot give up either side of the contradiction, and yet we cannot solve it.” The December lecture is the stricter, more abstemious performance of the same position.

The book also supplies the lecture’s missing chapter on organized religion. Waking World’s chapter XI distinguishes “sham religion” — “at bottom… always an expression of the desire to ‘save one’s soul’” — from “genuine religion,” defined exactly as the lecture defines superhumanism: “a self-forgetful love, or admiration, or worship, of something which is felt to be very ‘beautiful’ or ‘good’, and as in some manner superhuman… ‘religion’ is both man’s crown and his dunce’s cap.” And it contains a sentence that may be the most concentrated statement of the lecture’s anti-doctrinal discipline anywhere in his work: “It is tempting to say that the climax of worship is the glad acceptance of the fact that one’s ‘God’ has no need whatever to be worshipped.” The salute expects nothing back — not even a use for itself.

The rest of the book (read in full) supplies two further glosses. The science chapters anticipate the lecture’s claim that the numinous survives inside the laboratory: the true scientist “worships” the “non-human reality whose surface science studies… partly, I think, for its very ‘inhumanity’, for its apparent indifference to man; but also for its suggestion of limitless spiritual potentiality” — the Mighty Other located inside physics itself. And the political chapters (economic communism, conditional pacifism, the demand for a new order) show what the South Place audience would have known: the man preaching cosmic detachment that December was simultaneously a public radical — the lecture’s “more energy & more detachment” was being demonstrated, not just asserted.

The biography supplies the book’s own genesis, and it tightens the frame around the lecture year. Waking World began as commercial utopianism — “Its composition is traceable to a meeting with Victor Gollancz in the summer of 1932,” after which Stapledon “set to work on a ‘book of dogmas’ that would lay out a comprehensive prescription for building a global Utopia” — and Odd John was “a work of fiction written nearly in tandem with Waking World in 1933 and 1934.” Crossley’s own antithesis for what came next could caption this whole analysis: “If Waking World was Olaf’s ‘book of dogmas,’ Star Maker was to be his confession of faith as a pious agnostic.” The December 1934 lecture sits exactly on that hinge — dogmas behind it, confession ahead of it (§3.6 now documents how far ahead the confession already was).

The consequence for reading the manuscript: the South Place lecture was not an isolated performance but Stapledon taking his new book’s central and “only original” chapter to the most demanding possible audience for it — the home crowd of organized Humanism — within months of publication. The lecture’s compressed notes can therefore be glossed, page by page, from the book’s full prose — and where the notes are ambiguous, Waking World is the best control we have.

3.6 Star Maker (1937): the lecture made cosmology

If Last and First Men is the lecture’s prehistory, Star Maker is its consequence — the book in which “I am aware of an unspeakable Beauty, & Majesty, which I salute though it destroy me” is expanded into 250 pages. (Its deepest root, though, is private: the star-flight “fairy story” he wrote to Agnes from the front in September 1915 — see §3.1 — already contains the novel’s frame, though the letter’s waking is in a sleeping bag; the hillside is the novel’s addition.) Three years after South Place:

• The Preface defines worship exactly as the lecture does — an experience involving “detachment from all private, all social, all racial ends; not in the sense that it leads a man to reject them, but that it makes him prize them in a new way” — the lecture’s “more energy & more detachment” verbatim in spirit.
  Star Maker (1937) ↗ · ¶ 10 — quoted passage in context

  At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and on the Right, I have occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs. The valuable, though much damaged words "spiritual" and "worship," which have become almost as obscene to the Left as the good old sexual words are to the Right, are here intended to suggest an experience which the Right is apt to pervert and the Left to misconceive. This experience, I should say, involves detachment from all private, all social, all racial ends; not in the sense that it leads a man to reject them, but that it makes him prize them in a new way. The "spiritual life" seems to be in essence the attempt to discover and adopt the attitude which is in fact appropriate to our experience as a whole, just as admiration is felt to be in fact appropriate toward a well-grown human being. This enterprise can lead to an increased lucidity and finer temper of consciousness, and therefore can have a great and beneficial effect on behavior. Indeed, if this supremely humanizing experience does not produce, along with a kind of piety toward fate, the resolute will to serve our waking humanity, it is a mere sham and a snare.

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• The opening hilltop scene enacts sheet 24’s “trying to feel existence whole”: “irrationally I was seized with a strange worship… Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker… but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.”
  Star Maker (1937) ↗ · ¶ 24 — quoted passage in context

  But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.

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• The pilgrimage’s recurring torment — “torn between horror and fascination, between moral rage against the universe (or the Star Maker) and unreasonable worship” — is the humanist/superhumanist debate installed as the engine of the plot.
  Star Maker (1937) ↗ · ¶ 273 — quoted passage in context

  Yet while we felt dismay, we felt also increasingly the hunger to see and to face fearlessly whatever spirit was indeed the spirit of this cosmos. For as we pursued our pilgrimage, passing again and again from tragedy to farce, from farce to glory, from glory often to final tragedy, we felt increasingly the sense that some terrible, some holy, yet at the same time unimaginably outrageous and lethal, secret lay just beyond our reach. Again and again we were torn between horror and fascination, between moral rage against the universe (or the Star Maker) and unreasonable worship.

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• And the climax is sheet 28 dramatized to the letter: the cosmical mind, “fit at last to be the bride of God,” is instead “blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light,” confronted “not by welcoming and kindly love” but by “the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his finished work.” The narrator’s first cry is the humanist’s protest (“the creature was nobler than the creator; for the creature loved and craved love… but the creator neither loved nor had need of love”). The reversal that follows — “the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but the virtue of the creator was to create… And so there came upon me a strange peace and a strange joy” — is the lecture’s salute, performed at the largest possible scale. Even the lecture’s refusal of personal theism (“to call it personal is to belittle it”) governs the novel’s theology: the Star Maker is “spirit” but emphatically not a loving person, and the book’s God-myth is offered explicitly as myth — the lecture’s “all our knowledge of it is mythical.”
  Star Maker (1937) ↗ · ¶ 605 · ¶ 607 · ¶ 608 · ¶ 610 · ¶ 611 · ¶ 613 — quoted passages in context

  But this image, this symbol that my cosmical mind had conceived under the stress of inconceivable experience, broke and was transformed in the very act of my conceiving it, so inadequate was it to the actuality of the experience. Harking back in my blindness to the moment of my vision, I now conceived that the star which was the Star Maker, and the immanent center of all existence, had been perceived as looking down on me, his creature, from the height of his infinitude; and that when I saw him I immediately spread the poor wings of my spirit to soar up to him, only to be blinded and seared and struck down. It had seemed to me in the moment of my vision that all the longing and hope of all finite spirits for union with the infinite spirit were strength to my wings. It seemed to me that the Star, my Maker, must surely stoop to meet me and raise me and enfold me in his radiance. For it seemed to me that I, the spirit of so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light.

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  For I had been confronted not by welcoming and kindly love, but by a very different spirit. And at once I knew that the Star Maker had made me not to be his bride, nor yet his treasured child, but for some other end.

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  It seemed to me that he gazed down on me from the height of his divinity with the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his finished work; calmly rejoicing in its achievement, but recognizing at last the irrevocable flaws in its initial conception, and already lusting for fresh creation.

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  In my agony I cried out against my ruthless maker. I cried out that, after all, the creature was nobler than the creator; for the creature loved and craved love, even from the star that was the Star Maker; but the creator, the Star Maker, neither loved nor had need of love.

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  But no sooner had I, in my blinded misery, cried out, than I was struck dumb with shame. For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For the creator, if he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself. I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite, the unrealizable and incomprehensible goal of worshipping creatures.

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  And so there came upon me a strange peace and a strange joy.

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The novel’s vast middle (read in full) keeps rehearsing the lecture at every scale. Each imagined world’s crisis is posed in the lecture’s own two-part form — the struggle for true community and the struggle for a right attitude to the cosmos. The salute-formula itself is given to the dying Other Earth philosopher Bvalltu in the lecture’s exact grammar: “Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds…” And the perversions catalogue matches sheet 25’s: whole galaxies of “mad worlds” show community itself becoming herd-tyranny and even lucidity becoming an instrument of empire. Most severely, the theology out-hardens the lecture: the mature Star Maker contemplates his creatures “without pity,” loving them for “their finitude, their minute particularity, their tortured balance” — worship offered to something that grieves for nothing.

And the novel’s very last paragraph is the lecture’s double loyalty, reduced by Stapledon himself to two emblems. Standing on the hill above his suburb — having glimpsed, in the epilogue’s survey of the 1937 world, “the young men ranked together in thousands, exalted, possessed, saluting the flood-lit Fuhrer” (sheet 25’s herd-worship, observed in the wild) — the narrator ends:

Two lights for guidance. The first, our little glowing atom of community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy. Strange that in this light… the human crisis does not lose but gains significance.

Star Maker (1937) ↗ · ¶ 722 — quoted passage in context

Two lights for guidance. The first, our little glowing atom of community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy. Strange that in this light, in which even the dearest love is frostily assessed, and even the possible defeat of our half-waking world is contemplated without remission of praise, the human crisis does not lose but gains significance. Strange that it seems more, not less, urgent to play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the ultimate darkness.

read in context ↗

That is sheet 28 (“the claims of altruism, & of the humanistic ideal… yet I must salute”) and sheet 30 (“at once more energy & more detachment”) fused into a single image — the definitive self-formulation of what the South Place audience heard three years earlier.

But the page the two lights stand on should be read whole, because the epilogue has just done two further things. It revokes the vision’s letter even while keeping its spirit — “however false the vision in detail of structure, even perhaps in its whole form… false in every theme and facet, yet in spirit true” — the lecture’s “all our knowledge of it is mythical” applied, at the last, to the book’s own theophany. And it gives the human light epistemic priority: after conceding that the mind can grasp “nothing sure… except uncertainty itself,” the narrator singles out the lit window below — “We had found, or we had created, our little treasure of community. This was the one rock in all the welter of experience. This, not the astronomical and hypercosmical immensity… this, this alone, was the solid ground of existence.” The two lights are not symmetrical: one is ground, the other symbol. The salute survives the epilogue; the doctrine — even the novel’s own myth — does not. One contemporary reader saw exactly this shape, and his verdict is worth the record because he was the corpus’s own inverse twin (§4). Bertrand Russell — “one of Olaf’s intellectual heroes, someone he had occasionally criticized, often learned from, always respected, but had not yet actually met” — reviewed the novel, per Crossley’s report liking “the notion of the Star Maker as ‘an artist rather than a philanthropist’” and finding in the final meditation on the “two lights” “all that is good in religion without any of the bad features of most historical creeds.” (Crossley’s sentence renders the two lights as “of reason and love”; the novel’s own emblems, quoted above, are the atom of community and the cold light of the stars.) An artist rather than a philanthropist; religion’s good without the creeds: the lecture’s aesthetic Other and its no-doctrine discipline, recognized from outside — by the author of the humanist inversion the 1946 notes would file the position against.

The lecture thus stands between the two novels — though not alone: Waking World’s chapter XIII, in print earlier that same year, had already worked out discursively why the worship that ends Last and First Men is legitimate. What the lecture adds is the performance of that license before the audience with most reason to resist it; Star Maker is what the license was for. And the biography now lets the “between” be dated rather than assumed. The cosmos-book was already on the desk, and already circulating, before South Place: Naomi Mitchison was its first reader — “The draft of a cosmic history, from the first nebulae to the extinction of all life, accompanied Naomi late in the summer of 1933” to Perthshire — Aage Marcus heard about “the Cosmos-book” on his English visit in 1934 (“that book has haunted me as no other since you told me about it that April night 1934,” he wrote later), and L. H. Myers “first read a synopsis of Star Maker in the summer of 1934.” The book “was in early stages of composition in 1935,” was restarted after Odd John appeared (“Indeed I have started afresh on it several times and been dissatisfied,” Stapledon told Marcus), and was done only when “He finished the last chapter just before Christmas” 1936. The South Place evening therefore falls in the middle of the confession-book’s long, dissatisfied gestation — the lecturer defending the salute in December 1934 was a writer who had already tried once to write it out at cosmic length. (Whether that first attempt had already been set aside by the evening of the lecture, no document dates: the restarts are attested only from after Odd John — “started afresh… several times” is late 1935 at the earliest — and the “Discarded MS.” label on the surviving draft is a label found on it forty years on, not a dated act; see the end of this section.)

One qualification the archive can now document: the line from lecture to novel was not direct. Nebula Maker — the abandoned first draft (dated 1933 by the biography, on evidence set out at the end of this paragraph; published posthumously 1976; now held complete) — shows Stapledon first trying to write the cosmological book with a creator the achieved novel would forbid itself: seen with the bodily eye on page one (“I have seen God creating the cosmos, watching its growth, and finally destroying it”), given hands that spin chaos into threads “As flax issuing from between the fingers of a woman spinning,” a face “feline, snakelike… lean and keen and ruthless,” a Jehovah-flicker, even Genesis quoted straight. The draft already contains the lecture’s discipline in pieces — the bare compulsion (“Yet as I watched I was compelled to worship.”), the refusal of petition (“useless to pray to him; useless, and also, in some manner which I could not comprehend, base” — Waking World’s “God has no need whatever to be worshipped,” felt from the creature’s side), and the artist-God whose compassion seems “absorbed and used in some loftier and relentless exaltation” — the “aloof though passionate attention” theology caught mid-formation. But the strongest emotion the manuscript reached is the one 1937 will not allow itself as a last word: “From the bottom of my being, I loathed him.” — with a wounded woman in a mean suburb set above the deity (“Surely in her there was more divinity than in this deity.”) — and the draft breaks off mid-meditation, the destruction announced in its first sentence never shown. The “strange peace” of the achieved climax was not the lecture transcribed; it was won, at the second attempt, by abandoning a version in which the lecture’s discipline demonstrably failed to control the material — the draft violates “to call it personal is to belittle it” on every page. And the draft’s middle chapters split the human loyalty itself into the pair Saints and Revolutionaries (1939) would theorize: the pacifist nebula Bright Heart (“Till we are ready in our thousands to die yet never kill, the killers will thrive”) against the revolutionary Fire Bolt (“We are the instruments of fate. Our wills are the expression of mighty forces at work in the cosmos”), the proposed bargain stated in so many words — “You shall provide the vision. I will provide the ruthlessness in pursuit of the vision. Together, we can make the new world.” — refused (“No, I will not kill, but I will be killed.”), both strategies failed in turn, and the verdict given to the dying revolutionary, for the saint: “But at bottom he was right.” The two-loyalties structure the lecture presents as a clean pair was, in the fiction of these years, already three loyalties — cosmic salute, loving community, revolutionary force — with the tension inside humanism dramatized before 1939 theorized it. (Earlier editions of this analysis had to leave the draft undated — “c. 1933–36 by scholarly convention” — and derive every claim of sequence from its topical anchors (“the millions of unemployed, the recrudescence of barbarism in Europe and America”). The biography dates it. The draft Mitchison carried north in late summer 1933 is this document: “What she had read, labeled ‘Discarded MS. of Star-Maker,’ was found forty years later in Stapledon’s desk and published under the title Nebula Maker” — and Crossley’s settled phrase is “The earliest version of the cosmos-book, the 1933 fragment known as Nebula Maker.” If that dating holds — it rests on Mitchison’s correspondence, not on a date in the manuscript, and the load-bearing letter is itself undated: Crossley’s endnote catalogues it “undated [but probably summer 1933],” so his “late in the summer of 1933” is narrative synthesis over an editorial conjecture, and the year, not the month, is the defensible claim — the personal-God draft precedes the December 1934 lecture: the discipline the lecture preaches had already been tried at cosmic length, in a surviving attempt that breaks off unfinished and violates that discipline on every page, and the sequence draft → lecture → achieved novel now stands on documentary evidence rather than inference. What the evidence does not fix is the draft’s status on the lecture’s evening — read but not yet formally “discarded,” or already abandoned, the record cannot say. See ERRATA.md.)

3.7 Philosophy and Living (1939): the lecture as a Pelican syllabus — and the tease paid off

Two years after Star Maker, Penguin issued Philosophy and Living as a two-volume Pelican paperback, dedicated “TO MY STUDENTS IN W.E.A. CLASSES” — the classroom twin of the platform lectures, and (both volumes now held and read in full) the most complete discursive statement of the 1934 position he ever published. If Waking World (§3.5) is the lecture in book form, Philosophy and Living is the lecture as a curriculum: Volume I drills the humility (immortality, mind and body, knowledge, reasoning, ethics), and Volume II builds back up through exactly the lecture’s two halves — personality-in-community (chs. VIII–IX) and the salute (ch. XII).

Volume I plants a deliberate tease. Its immortality chapter ends in the lecture’s exact posture — “complete agnosticism. Emotionally it involves detachment from the desire for immortality, through the discovery of more satisfying values” — and, pressed on whether he asks anything of the cosmos, Stapledon answers: “Do I really demand that the universe should treat human individuals with charity, or even with justice? The answer is emphatically ‘No!’… Something I do demand, but this is irrelevant to the present discussion.” Volume II is where the debt is paid.

The humanist half comes first. The personality chapter ends on the lecture’s floor — “It is not the individual as such that matters, but the vital, mental, spiritual activity which constitutes him… the whole aim of society should be to enhance the capacity of individuals for the life of reason and of love” — and the community chapter formalizes the lecture’s sociology into a worked triad of herd-mentality, individualism, and genuine community (Gerald Heard credited, and corrected), with a test the lecture never stated so crisply: “the degree of restriction of expression may be taken as a rough measure of a society’s approximation to community.” Sheet 25’s perverted worship even gets its psychological mechanism: personification as misplaced transference of “the reaction proper to persons” — “The religious devotee personifies almightiness and love. The patriot personifies the State or the People.”

The Heard credit-and-correction can now be given its texts on both sides. The book Philosophy and Living’s reading list names is The Ascent of Humanity (1929), and it is at last held (August 2026) — the acquisition took two false starts, since the scan first supplied under that title identifies itself, by its own front matter and preface (“THIS book concludes a trilogy”), as the trilogy’s third volume, The Source of Civilization (1935), and the one public scan the web offers under the 1929 title proved to be the same mislabeled 1935 book again. The 1929 book states the one idea it calls “fundamental” in a sentence: “Man’s consciousness was once pre-individual, a group consciousness, is now mainly individual, and is becoming super-individual.” The 1935 preface restates that thesis in Heard’s own retrospective words — faithfully, the two texts now confirm — and it is exactly the theory Stapledon engages. Society’s original cement, Heard had argued, was “the persistence of the animal group-consciousness right on into historic times” — “the persons at the top of society were self-conscious individuals, the vast mass remained unself-conscious and thus capable of an unquestioning cohesion which was the real social cement” — and the modern individual is a late, incomplete secession from that state: “Part of the spirit of the self-conscious individual is neither self-conscious nor individual but requires a linkage with his fellows in order that he may be whole,” a part “separated off by the growth of self-conscious individuality and the formation of an insulated ‘limen’.” Set beside this, P&L’s acknowledgement — “It will be obvious that in formulating these ideas I have been influenced by the writings of Mr. Gerald Heard, but I have also, for my own purposes, modified his theories in some very important respects” — resolves into two precise corrections. First, where Heard’s “evolution of consciousness” runs “from the pre-individual type, through the individual type, to the fully social type,” Stapledon refuses to decide what the theory is even about — “I cannot determine whether he is describing different kinds of attitudes taken up by the individual toward society or different forms of a communal consciousness or group mind. In what follows I shall discuss merely the attitudes” — de-metaphysicalizing the scheme into a psychology. Second, where Heard historicizes, Stapledon flattens the sequence into a standing repertoire: “I cannot believe, as Mr. Heard does, that it is possible to trace in history a gradual evolution” from herd-dominance to community; “Instead I incline to believe that the three attitudes have been common ever since our species emerged from the subhuman.” The reading list files the same two objections against the 1929 book by name — its “central idea” is “very significant,” but the book “telescopes” psychological evolution “into very much too short a period,” and “he never makes it clear to me whether the pre-individual kind of consciousness is literally a group mind or simply an un-selfconscious way of experiencing on the part of the individual. The latter, I hope.” Both objections can now be checked against their target, and both land. The telescoping is structural — the 1929 book runs whole psychic metamorphoses inside datable history, classical Greece “a desperate experiment in psychic evolution” in which man “failed to get through from full self-consciousness to superconsciousness.” And the held text answers the group-mind question — against the hope. Heard’s own Note to the Introduction makes the pre-individual state literal: the primitive constituent “must have been in constant telepathic communication with the rest of the group,” a linkage that “prevents any consciousness of individual separateness”; the individuals-only reading is reserved for the present, where co-consciousness proper “is now nowhere surviving.” Heard splits the ontology by epoch — which explains how Stapledon could honestly report the ambiguity, and why the hope was hopeless. That last hope is Stapledon compressed to a clause: take the developmental psychology, refuse the group mind — the same refusal his personification mechanism (above) turns against State- and People-worship, and the discipline that keeps sheet 25’s communal worship an experience of individuals facing the Other together rather than a fused herd-subject. Two footnotes round it off. Heard himself had begun the retreat by 1935 (“Further reflection, however, showed me that this cohesion is not great”). And the held third book’s own thesis — life advancing by “sensitiveness, awareness,” civilization surviving only if the individual can “experience extra-individuality” — sits near enough to the lecture’s watchwords (“keeping sensitive to the Superhuman”; “Advance = finer adjustment to reality”) to make the affinity legible, though the 1935 date rules this book out as a source for the 1934 sheets, and the direction of any influence there is not established.

The superhumanist half arrives in the Conclusions chapter, and it is the 1934 lecture’s second movement in textbook prose. The mysticism section names the object of worship in the lecture’s own key — the reality disclosed in ecstatic experience is “sometimes referred to in terms of dread, and even terror, as the divine and ruthless ‘Other,’ rightly careless of man and his petty desires” — and the personality chapter has already defined the experience attitudinally, exactly as the lecture does: its essence “consists not in discovering new truth but in taking up a new attitude… of delighted or even ecstatic acceptance of the universe.” The Star Maker climax appears as flat doctrine: in the mystical mode a man “realises that it is foolish and impious to demand that the universe shall be moral, or that the universal spirit shall be moral, or that ‘God’ shall be good. These, he feels, do not exist for the sake of morality. On the contrary, morality exists for them.” And the chapter closes by formalizing the lecture’s double loyalty as “the two fundamental religious experiences… between the moral protest, which seeks to alter the universe, and the ecstatic acceptance of the universe, with all its glory and its shame.” Nor does the textbook pretend the two halves fit. Its Conclusions admit, in order: that “mystical experience is both one of the most dangerous moral snares and one of the most important sources of moral strength”; that “Plainly there is a logical conflict here, and it is useless to pretend that there is not”; and that the acceptance-side “good” is, “it must be admitted, both unintelligible and dangerous… because it may lead to a complacent acquiescence in the misfortunes of others, as being ‘all in the picture,’ all needed for the perfection of the universe” — the exact charge the lecture’s humanist critic had pressed. Only then comes the honest classroom shrug that is pure Stapledon: “if this intellectual reconciliation is unsound, which it may well be, let us never forget that these two experiences do in fact support one another, and that for the wise conduct of practical life both are needed.” That is A Man Divided’s “both at once, always,” taught to evening students eleven years early.

Two structural anticipations matter for the later documents. First, the reconciliation runs through a two-aspect anthropology — the finite individual whose “whole duty is to champion the cause of personality-in-community,” and another aspect that “finds precarious contact with the eternal and perfected spirit of the cosmos” — the germ of the 1946 lecture’s “more awake and less awake states” (§3.8). Second, the conclusions give personality-in-community cosmic scope (“scattered among the myriads of stars, there are, or will be, purposeful beings as superior to us as we are to the amœba”) and cite the novel by name: “In my earlier book, Star Maker, I have sketched an imaginary history of the cosmos on these lines” — the fiction offered, in his own voice, as the metaphysics chapter’s imaginative appendix.

Three smaller threads bind the archive together. The axiological half of the Brighton 1949 position on the paranormal (§3.10) is already fixed here — though across a changed question, for 1939 grades the powers in general where 1949 grades what proof of survival would add, and the epistemics meanwhile move from hedged personal inclination to reported expert consensus (the Brighton dossier draws the comparison precisely): telepathy and clairvoyance he inclines, “with much hesitation,” to believe real (“I am not in a position to judge whether such powers exist or not”), and they “may constitute a fragmentary hint of powers proper to a higher plane of evolution,” yet “I cannot see anything particularly lofty about them… in themselves they are merely strange modes of perceiving events of commonplace order.” The reading appendix keeps Otto on the syllabus, recommending The Idea of the Holy as “a corrective to the much commoner idea that the essence of religion is the conviction of the deity’s friendliness” — a fair précis of the book now that it is held: Otto’s chapter on the Wrath of God (“like a hidden force of nature,” “incalculable” and “arbitrary”) is aimed precisely at “those persons who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love, and a sort of confidential intimacy, in a word, only those aspects of God which turn towards the world of men.” And the final chapter — “The Practical Upshot,” the 1939 politics of the double loyalty (“We are losing faith in the free critical intelligence. And we are losing faith in charity”; economic determinism “is thrusting us not toward the Marxian Utopia but toward Fascism”; the Left “must also find both a philosophy and a religion”) — opens with the Spectral Tarsier, of which the book says: “Not by weapons but by correlation of subtle eyes and subtle hands through subtle brain, this creature triumphed.” That same tarsier, with the same triad (“discrimination manipulation versatility”), opens the Alternative Futures lecture notes in our archive: he was lecturing from this book’s last chapter.

3.7b Beyond the “Isms” (1942): the salute under the Blitz — and “agnostic piety” already in print

Between the Pelican syllabus and the Conway Hall return, the record used to go quiet: the war years offered no discursive statement of the position, and the analysis had to jump from 1939 to 1946. The gap is now closed. Beyond the “Isms” (1942) — Searchlight Book No. 16, the sixpenny series Orwell’s Lion and the Unicorn opened — is Stapledon’s wartime personal statement, and it is the missing developmental document: commissioned in mid-1941 for “Secker and Warburg’s series of blue-jacketed paperbacks known as ‘Searchlight Books,’” little volumes “designed to blueprint the post-war world,” published the following March, and marked in the writing by a personal crisis rather than by the troop-lecturing this analysis once guessed at — its own preface says it became “a much more personal book than I had planned” (Crossley ties the change to the events of 1941–42 in Stapledon’s private life; see ERRATA.md for the correction). It is the 1934 position restated with the bombs falling, and audibly changed by them. (Acquired via the owner’s scan, August 2026; in US copyright, so held in the research corpus and quoted here in excerpt.)

The wartime platform itself — which this analysis once mistook for the book’s origin — still deserves its own dated record, because it is the ecology in which every 1940s statement was delivered, and the biography documents both its scale and a real change in Stapledon’s pedagogy. Civilian forces-lecturing ran at industrial volume: “At its busiest, the program had four thousand courses running during a six-month period in 1943, and over sixty thousand individual lectures were delivered. Many of the lecturers, like Olaf, were veterans of the Workers’ Educational Association.” The audiences were unlike anything the WEA had trained him on — conscripts who “had had no say about attending” — and the contrast changed his mind about his own tradition: “Trained in the voluntary tradition of the WEA, Olaf at first found teaching soldiers forced to be students distasteful, but by the end of the war he had changed his mind,” arguing in his own words that “only by compulsion is it possible to reach the people who need adult education most, the people who would never dream of taking the initial plunge freely.” His stated reason for the work is the whole lecture-shelf’s politics in a sentence: “We shall never have a real democracy… till masses of ordinary people are educated for democratic citizenship.” (None of this re-dates the book: the mid-1941 Searchlight commission stands, and the withdrawn troop-circuit genesis claim stays withdrawn — see ERRATA.md.)

The book’s business is salvage. Its Foreword announces the lecture’s own two-sided posture — an attitude combining “bland assurance about fundamental values with an almost complete agnosticism about the universe at large” — and Part II narrates the collapse of Christianity as the loss of a feeling, not the refutation of propositions: “The virgin birth, the remission of sins, the resurrection” and the rest could only be believed metaphorically, and “all these intellectual formulations, even ‘God’, could have been sacrificed without harm if only men could have retained the inarticulate feeling of the reality and beauty of the spirit.” What is salvaged is a perception, never a proposition: “the essential thing in religious experience is the discovery of the spirit,” and speculation about the spirit’s cosmic status is free but “intellectual integrity forbids that we should allow the findings of such speculations ever to become articles of faith.” Waking World’s sham-versus-genuine test (§3.5) recurs at every level, translated but intact: the “commoner sort” of believer held by the wish to “avoid eternal damnation” against the few for whom the church transmits the real thing; “The great and bloody crime of the churches has been that they have so often and so subtly murdered the spirit in men, while affirming their loyalty to it”; even the sense of sin is split on the 1934 axis — morbid fear-guilt versus “love-guilt,” which “is an inevitable and wholesome consequence of disloyalty to the thing loved.” And the 1946 lecture’s theological translations (§3.8) are already operating here, four years early: “doing things for the glory of God” is rendered as action under the spell of the spirit — “This, I take it, is the essence of what the religious people mean when they speak” of it — with conversion, sin and worship systematically translated the same way, and P&L’s coinage carried forward as the book’s social formula: “The spirit manifests itself solely in personality-in-community.”

The salute survives the Blitz — once, at the book’s climax (“Beyond Man,” the final pages), and in a changed register. Facing a universe that in one of its aspects seems “utterly alien and hostile to the spirit,” Stapledon allows that even this horror may be spirit “on a plane beyond our comprehension,” and that “we may feel the presence of an overwhelming, terrible beauty, careless of us, yet compelling our adoration.” The prayer that follows is the fullest wartime statement of the salute anywhere in his nonfiction — “Use me, break me; but let my breaking be a part of your dread beauty… let the breaking of this human instrument somehow contribute to your music” — sheet 28, prayed under bombardment. But two changes of register are unmistakable. Where 1934 claims acquaintance (“I am aware of an unspeakable Beauty”), 1942 is systematically conditional — “we may feel” — and the personification is flagged as personification in the very act of uttering it. And the Mighty Other is never named as such: the dread thing is approached through the spirit, as the spirit’s incomprehensible upper register. The Blitz did not silence the salute; it made Stapledon hold it at arm’s length — the prayer quoted, as it were, rather than prayed. (The salute-verb itself surfaces only politically, offered to the humanist light: “I salute with heart-felt respect” the Russian passion for community.)

The P&L logical conflict is restated in substance and reframed in structure. Immediately after the prayer: “These two moods, though logically in conflict with one another, are the alternating moods of worship” — the moral protest for the spirit’s struggle against the mood which “accepts and welcomes the final defeat of all recognizable spirit” as somehow involved in the rightness of things. That is 1939’s “logical conflict… useless to pretend that there is not,” reaffirmed in wartime. But where 1934/1939 set two loyalties against two objects (man; the inhuman Other), here both moods are moods of worship of a single object, the spirit — and both are then disarmed doctrinally: “What the truth is about the part of the spirit in the universe, we cannot know,” and even the acceptance-mood’s consoling theory (evil as “all within the picture”) is forbidden as belief, exactly as P&L had called it “both unintelligible and dangerous.” Whether this monistic reframing is an advance or a wartime softening the text does not say — it never acknowledges that anything has changed — and the “Use me, break me” prayer shows the old Other still fully audible under the new vocabulary. The tension is kept as psychology; the metaphysical dualism that generated it is quietly dissolved into an agnosticism of “the spirit.”

The headline, though, is lexical, and it antedates the mature position by four years. The book’s final movement asks the religious critics’ question in their own words — “sheer humanism, the devotion to the fullest possible development of man’s nature just because it is man’s, is not enough” — half-endorses it (worship can “free us from the limitations of complacent humanism”), and closes: “Even worship must be agnostic,” for “for very loyalty to the spirit itself we must see that our piety remains always agnostic piety.” “Agnostic piety” — the formula this analysis had treated as 1946 Conway Hall and 1949 Brighton platform vocabulary (§3.8, §3.10) — was published in 1942, in the closing movement of a sixpenny war pamphlet, and it arrives precisely by absorbing the dread cosmic Other into “the spirit.” The 1946 lecture’s title question, and its answer’s very idiom, were on the bookstalls before the war ended. One further definitional novelty points forward rather than back: worship is now defined two-sidedly — “to worship is to feel at once other than the object worshipped and yet essentially one with it” — an identity-clause foreign to 1934 (where the object was emphatically not ourselves) and the germ of the Spirit/Other identity-doubt of Death into Life and “The Core” (§3.9).

3.8 Is Humanism Enough? (Conway Hall, November 1946): the mature restatement

Twelve years later — after the war, after Philosophy and Living, after Ian Suttie and Julian Huxley had entered his reading — Stapledon returned to the same society, in the Conway Hall it had occupied since 1929, with the same question. It was his second appearance there that year: on 7 April 1946 he and Agnes had shared the same platform, she reading Shakespeare and Austen, he lecturing on “Personal Relations in the Family” (§1) — so the November lecture was a return to a hall he was actively working, not a pilgrimage back to a remembered one. And the same month carries a private counterpoint the biography preserves: on 5 November 1946 the editor Peter Albery rejected “The Peak and the Town” — “Albery found the allegory too obscure and asked for something else” — the double-life allegory turned away in the very weeks the double loyalty was being restated from the South Place platform (a conjunction of dates, we note, not a documented connection). The 1946 notes show both continuity and revealing development:

• The structure is now explicitly dialectical: “thesis — orthodox Christianity, doctrinal theism; antithesis — humanism, scientific materialism; synthesis — what we are groping for.” And the sharpest new formulation: “Humanism is not the antithesis to Theism but a compromise, a failure to make a synthesis.”
• “Lowbrow/highbrow” has matured into “simple humanism” (utilitarianism, skewered by the same push-pin) and “evolutionary humanism” (Huxley), whose error is “founding ethics on biology” while its value is using biology to clarify ethics — a subtler version of 1934’s intuitionism.
• The 1934 “felt acquaintance” has become a worked-out epistemology of “more awake and less awake states,” with the striking doctrine that the most awake states discover values (“intellectual integrity, emotional & conative integrity”) that matter “in a relatively absolute way” — visible in principle to “any rank of personality, in any period, & any world.”
• The Mighty Other has been supplemented by “the spirit” — “not a substance but a Way of life” (his margin note: “Tao”) — the ideal of “personality-in-community”; and the wartime Stapledon now translates theological categories he had bluntly refused in 1934: doing things “for the glory of God” becomes “for the glory of the spirit” (a translation already worked out in print in Beyond the “Isms”, 1942 — §3.7b — and repeated in his 1945–46 atomic-power essay: “Since the word ‘God’ is so ambiguous, I should prefer to say ‘for the glory of the spirit’”); grace and salvation become the “incursion by a new vision which takes possession, kills, recreates on a new plane.”
  rare pieces (1908–49) ↗ · ¶ 223 — quoted passage in context

  What would be the use, it may be asked, of these wild ventures? Are we not better off as we are? The only right answer is a religious answer, though not one that is religious in the orthodox sense. Little by little, more and more of us are realising that the true way of life, for the individual and for the race as a whole, is to live for something other than the individual, and, in a sense, even other than the race. Only if we regard ourselves and our human species as instruments for the fulfilling of the spiritual potentiality of this planet, can we find real peace. We have to develop our capacity, but not simply for our own satisfaction. Always we must keep that sense of instrumentality which used to be expressed in the old phrase "for the glory of God." Since the word "God" is so ambiguous, I should prefer to say "for the glory of the spirit" which is experienced as the very essence of each of us, and yet so much more than all of us together.

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• The final position gets the lapidary formula the 1934 lecture lacked: “My view is Humanism Plus… My view is Theism Minus, but Plus also” — and “agnosticism must be agnostic piety, otherwise emotionally lopsided.” (The piety formula was not minted on this platform: Beyond the “Isms” had published it in 1942 — “our piety remains always agnostic piety” — see §3.7b.)

Reading the two together, 1934 is the bolder document — closer to the terror and splendour of Star Maker — while 1946 is the more constructive one, closer to the communitarian ethics of his late books. The 1934 lecture asks us to salute; the 1946 lecture asks us to synthesize.

The same year’s Youth and Tomorrow (1946) is the book-length companion to the Conway Hall lecture, and its chapter “Beyond Man” answers the title question in both directions at once. It states the late ground rule in one lapidary sentence — “In these days there can be no true religion that is not founded on a very thorough intellectual agnosticism” — and resolves the question conditionally: “If humanism rejects this kind of experience as simply a delusion, then humanism is indeed not enough”; if humanism can accept it, humanism is “the attitude needed for the proper conduct of mankind’s coming revolution.” And about the acceptance-side experience itself the book is disarmingly frank: “On this subject I shall speak with great hesitation, because I cannot get my own mind clear about it.” He had been saying so from platforms since 1934; here he says it in print, in a book for the young. The two-loyalties problem was never, by his own late account, solved — only practised.

3.9 The salute institutionalized, doubted, fictionalized and restored: the rest of the shelf (1935–1950)

A pass through the rest of the held corpus — the remaining novels, the short fiction, and the other surviving lecture notes; not yet everything he published, since Saints and Revolutionaries (1939), New Hope for Britain (1939) and Seven Pillars of Peace (1944) remain unheld (REPORT, section 8) — shows the lecture’s position recurring across that shelf for the rest of his life. The claim should be tiered honestly. What the documents demonstrate is recurrence: the salute, the double loyalty, and the no-doctrine discipline reappear, verbatim or nearly, in every major post-1934 book we hold. Dependence on the lecture itself is demonstrable only where the texts touch it directly — Waking World’s shared chapter (§3.5), Philosophy and Living’s formulas (§3.7), the 1946 return to the same society and question (§3.8). Elsewhere the relation is better read as a shared armature: the lecture is the earliest full platform statement of a position the later books keep rebuilding, not a source every book can be shown to have consulted — and for the unheld titles we can claim nothing at all. But the continuity is not simple confirmation, and this section should not read as a harvest of echoes. The later corpus does three things at once: it institutionalizes the position (a Pelican curriculum, a sixpenny wartime statement (§3.7b), a book for the young, formulas like “agnostic piety” — in print by 1942 — and “Humanism Plus”); it doubts it in his own discursive voice (the “logical conflict… useless to pretend that there is not,” §3.7; “I cannot get my own mind clear about it,” §3.8); and, in the last private documents, it repeatedly fictionalizes and restores its object. The late record in fact holds three distinct positions, which should be kept apart rather than run together into a “fictionalized endpoint”: an object saluted while its very existence is left unknown (Brighton 1949’s “whether thou art… or not,” §3.10); a salute riding, for the floor of one dark night, on an acknowledged practical fiction (The Opening of the Eyes, meditations 16–17); and that book’s actual arc, which restores second-person address and ends in commanded action (§3.10). What stays fixed is the practice — the salute, the double loyalty. The doctrine around the practice is progressively evacuated, and repeatedly re-addressed. With that frame in place, the ordeals: every major post-1934 book we hold runs the lecture’s position through a different one —

• Odd John (1935), published months after South Place, stages the “superhumanism” the lecture disavowed — a literal brotherhood of supermen — and lets its ethics go murderously wrong (killings justified by higher-loyalty logic, narrated by an adoring narrator who models worship misdirected at beings). The colony redeems itself only by enacting the lecture: facing extinction, it renounces its weapon “to fulfil as much as possible of our accepted spiritual task of worship,” and dedicates itself to “salute That in the universe which was of supreme excellence.” The Superman is rejected as master and kept only as worshipper. The novel also names its own ancestor, and the acknowledgment can now be walked from biography to endnote to primary text without leaving the held corpus: Crossley writes that of the superman novels preceding Odd John “Stapledon indicated the express influence of the last of these” — Beresford’s Hampdenshire Wonder (1911; now held) — his endnote pointing to the novel’s own pages, where the narrator’s preface measures John against “Mr. J. D. Beresford’s account of the unhappy Victor Stott” and John learns to read “in the manner of Victor Stott.” What the precursor lacks measures what the novel added: Beresford’s Wonder is intellect without worship — “Intellectual insight and absolute spiritual blindness” is his own philosopher’s verdict — his one unanswered question (“Is there none of my kind?” — “There is none of your kind”) is the question John’s search and colony answer, and his death in a pond is left pointing at offended religion (“what terrific acts of misapplied courage and ferocious brutality the fanatics of history have been capable of performing when their creed and their authority have been set at naught”). Odd John is, almost schematically, the answer-book — the kind found, the colony founded, and the 1934 lecture’s religion added to a genre that had none; and the genre answered back in season (Wells’s 1937 Star Begotten, which names Last and First Men inside its fiction — §4).
  Odd John (1935) ↗ · ¶ 239 · ¶ 231 · ¶ 7 · ¶ 24 — quoted passages in context

  too impoverished, spiritually, for our real work. But as things are, surely the wise course is to forego the weapon, and make up our minds to fulfil as much as possible of our accepted spiritual task of worship before we are destroyed.” I could tell by merely watching the faces of the islanders that they were now in the throes of a conflict of wills such as they had never before experienced. The issue was not merely one of life and death; it was one of fundamental principle. When Shên Kuo had done, there was a clamour of protest and argument, much of which was actually vocal; for the islanders were deeply moved. It was soon agreed that the decision should be postponed for a day. Meanwhile there must be a solemn meeting in the meeting-room, and all hearts must be deeply searched in a most earnest effort to reach mental accord and the right decision. The meeting was silent. It lasted for many hours. When it was over I learned that all, including Ng- Gunko and John himself, had accepted with conviction and with gladness the views of Shên Kuo. The weeks passed. Telepathic observation informed us that, when the second cruiser had left us, considerable amnesia and other mental derangements had occurred among those of the crew who had landed on the island. The Commander’s report was incoherent and incredible. Like the first Commander, he was disgraced. The Foreign Offices of the world, through their secret services, ferreted out as much as possible of this latest incident. They did not form anything like an accurate idea of events, but they procured shreds of truth embroidered with fantastic exaggeration. There was a general feeling that something more was at stake than a diplomatic coup, and the discomfiture of the British Government. Something weird, something quite beyond reckoning was going on on that remote island. Three ships had been sent away with their crews in mental

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  abandoned. The islanders told me that they had certain supreme tasks on hand which must, if possible, be finished before the end. The true purpose of the awakened spirit, they reminded me, is twofold, namely to help in the practical talk of world-building, and to employ itself to the best of its capacity in intelligent worship. Under the first head they had at least created something glorious though ephemeral, a microcosm, a world in little. But the more ambitious part of their practical purpose, the founding of a new species, they were destined never to fulfil. Therefore they were concentrating all their strength upon the second aim. They must apprehend existence as precisely and zestfully as they could, and salute That in the universe which was of supreme excellence. This purpose, with the aid of Langatse, they might yet advance to a definite plane of achievement which at present still lay beyond them, though their most mature minds had already glimpsed it. With their unique practical experience and their consciousness of approaching doom they might, they said, within a few months offer to the universal Spirit such a bright and peculiar jewel of worship as even the great Langatse himself, alone and thwarted, could not create. This most exalting and most exacting of all tasks made it necessary for them to give up all but the necessary daily toil in the fields and in the canoes. Not that very much of their time could be devoted to their spiritual exercises, for there was danger of overstraining their powers. It was necessary therefore to secure plentiful relaxation. Much of the life of the colony during this period seemed to consist of recreation. There was much bathing in the shark-free harbour, much love-making, much dancing and music and poetry, and much aesthetic juggling with colour and form. It was difficult for me to enter into the aesthetic appreciation of the islanders, but from their reactions to their own art in this period I judged that the

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  John’s laugh was strangely disturbing. It was a low, rapid, crisp chuckle. It reminded me of that whispered crackling prelude which sometimes precedes a really great crash of thunder. But no thunder followed it, only a moment’s silence; and for his hearers an odd tingling of the scalp. I believe that this inhuman, this ruthless but never malicious laugh of John’s contained the key to all that baffles me in his character. Again and again I asked myself why he laughed just then, what precisely was he laughing at, what did his laughter really mean, was that strange noise really laughter at all, or some emotional reaction incomprehensible to my kind? Why, for instance, did the infant John laugh through his tears when he had upset a kettle and was badly scalded? I was not present at his death, but I feel sure that, when his end came, his last breath spent itself in zestful laughter. Why? In failing to answer these questions, I fail to understand the essential John. His laughter, I am convinced, sprang from some aspect of his experience entirely beyond my vision. I am therefore, of course, as John affirmed, a very incompetent biographer. But if I keep silence, the facts of his unique career will be lost for ever. In spite of my incompetence, I must record all that I can, in the hope that, if these pages fall into the hands of some being of John’s own stature, he may imaginatively see through them to the strange but glorious spirit of John himself. That others of his kind, or approximately of his kind, are now alive, and that yet others will appear, is at least probable. But as John himself discovered, the great majority of these very rare supernormals, whom John sometimes called “wide-awakes,” are either so delicate physically or so unbalanced mentally that they leave no considerable mark on the world. How pathetically one-sided the supernormal development may be is revealed in Mr. J. D. Beresford’s account of the unhappy Victor Stott. I hope

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  Even Stephen was praiseful. He told his mother, “That kid’s all right really. The hiding did him good. He has apologized about the mower, and hoped he hadn’t jiggered it up.” But fate had a surprise in store for Stephen. In spite of his father’s discouragement, John had been spending odd moments among the medical and physiological books. The anatomical drawings interested him greatly, and to understand them properly, he had to read. His vocabulary was of course very inadequate, so he proceeded in the manner of Victor Stott, and read through from cover to cover, first a large English dictionary, then a dictionary of physiological terms. Very soon he became so fluent that he had only to run his eye rapidly down the middle of a printed page to be able to understand it and retain it indefinitely. But John was not content with theory. One day, to Pax’s horror, he was found cutting up a dead rat on the dining-room floor, having thoughtfully spread a newspaper to protect the carpet. Henceforth his anatomical studies, both practical and theoretical, were supervised by Doc. For a few months John was enthralled. He showed great skill in dissection and microscopy. He catechized his father at every opportunity, and often exposed the confusion of his answers; till at last Pax, remembering the mathematicians, insisted that the tired doctor must have respite. Henceforth John studied unaided. Then suddenly he dropped biology as he had dropped mathematics. Pax asked, “Have you finished with ‘life’ as you finished with ‘number?’ ” “No,” replied John, “but life doesn’t hang together like number. It won’t make a pattern. There’s something wrong with all those books. Of course, I often see they’re stupid, but there must be something deeper wrong too, which I can’t see.”

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  Crossley, Speaking for the Future (1994) ↗ · ¶ 917 — quoted passage in context

  *Odd John* has a pivotal place in the history of fictions that imagine the difficult emergence, by natural process or artificial intervention, of a higher form of humanity. Of the notable "superman" novels that preceded it—Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*, Wells's *Food of the Gods*, and J. D. Beresford's *Hampdenshire Wonder*—Stapledon indicated the express influence of the last of these on his book.[61] Several later contributions to the type, all by authors who read Stapledon carefully, have the mark of *Odd John* on them. John's *homo superior* in search of a community becomes Wells's *homo sideralis* in *Star-Begotten* (1937) and Theodore Sturgeon's *homo gestalt* in *More Than Human* (1953). Arthur Clarke's metamorphosed children in *Childhood's End* (also 1953) are nearly as weird as John's companions. Our last glimpse of Ben Lovatt in Doris Lessing's *Fifth Child* (1988), of all the analogues the one most nearly like *Odd John*, is an image of him on the television screen "standing rather apart from the crowd, staring at the camera with his goblin eyes, or searching the faces in the crowd for another of his own kind."[62]

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  Beresford, Hampdenshire Wonder (1911) ↗ · ¶ 1126 · ¶ 1003 · ¶ 1004 · ¶ 1694 — quoted passages in context

  "Sublimated material. Intellectual insight and absolute spiritual blindness," replied Challis, getting to his feet. "The child has gone too far in one direction--in another he has made not one step. His mind is a magnificent, terrible machine. He has the imagination of a mathematician and a logician developed beyond all conception, he has not one spark of the imagination of a poet. And so he cannot deal with men; he can't understand their weaknesses and limitations; they are geese and hens to him, creatures to be scared out of his vicinity. However, I will see what I can do. Could you arrange for the members of the Authority to come to my place?"

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  "Is there none of my kind?" he said. "Is this," and he laid a hand on the pile of books before him, "is this all?"

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  "There is none of your kind," replied Challis; and the little figure born into a world that could not understand him, that was not ready to receive him, walked to the window and climbed out into the darkness.

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  There is but one other person who could have been implicated, and I hesitate to name him in this place. Yet one remembers what terrific acts of misapplied courage and ferocious brutality the fanatics of history have been capable of performing when their creed and their authority have been set at naught.

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• Philosophy and Living (1939) rebuilds the lecture as a two-volume classroom syllabus — from Volume I’s “complete agnosticism” and “personality-in-community” to Volume II’s ruthless “Other” and “morality exists for them.” Now held complete and treated in its own section above (§3.7).
• Beyond the “Isms” (1942) restates the whole position discursively under the Blitz — the salute held at arm’s length, the conflict reframed as “alternating moods of worship,” and “agnostic piety” put into print. Now held complete and treated in its own section above (§3.7b).
• Darkness and the Light (1942) inverts the vision to test the loyalty: its adepts pierce to ultimate reality expecting kinship and “recoiled in horror from the unspeakable facts” — and the human ideal holds anyway: “the life of love and of intelligence is good absolutely… No devastating discovery about the nature of the ultimate reality can shake that immediate perception.” That is the lecture’s independence-of-ethics claim (sheet 6’s intuitionism) proved under the worst case; and the book’s “synthetic faith,” a state religion engineered by psychologists — its propagandists praising “the virtues of acquiescence and obedience, and the ecstasy of cruelty,” its doctrine teaching that “the supreme ecstasy was to be experienced under torture” — is sheet 25’s perverted worship made policy.
  Darkness and the Light (1942) ↗ · ¶ 195 · ¶ 197 · ¶ 81 · ¶ 118 — quoted passages in context

  mind, and good and evil. It was in the hope of gaining insight into these matters, but above all in order to have access to the occult reality, that the forwards had been working during the preceding centuries. At last, they said, they had momentarily penetrated to the deeper truth. They had for the first time come face to face with the vaster real. But the experience, far from being beatific, had been terrible. They had recoiled in horror from the unspeakable facts. Servants of the light, children of the light, they had discovered that the light itself in their own eyes was but a subjective figment, like the retinal lights that a man sees in the dark, or when his eyes are closed. For a moment they had succeeded in opening their eyes, but only to discover a deeper and more formidable darkness. Or was it something worse than darkness? They had pressed forward thus far without any doubt that their venture would lead to a fortifying of the struggling human spirit by intercourse with a vaster but essentially kindred spiritual reality. Over a period of many generations many great saints and thousands of devoted followers, spurred by this hope, had passed through the testing fires of discipline, had ventured into strange and icy spheres of spiritual experience, had gathered signs and intimations of a glory still to be revealed, had borne witness to their fellow men. And now at last the heirs to all this great treasure and greater promise, having gathered all their strength for the final assault on the locked door of mystery, had prized it open only to glimpse an incomprehensible horror, and to fall back in dismay. During the long conference in Lhasa the whole population of forwards, assembled under their spiritual leaders, dared once more to face the terrible truth, lest there should have been some mistake. But once more they encountered the seemingly ultimate horror. After long contemplation and

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  vanish. At any moment, they insisted, this might happen. Indeed, that it had not already happened, seemed to be a miracle. The forwards affirmed that they had peered and peered upwards (so to speak) between the rioting titanic limbs in search of the celestial light; but the only luminosity was on the ground. It was all though the flakes themselves, congested into a thawing snowfield, created in their constant dying a dim phosphorescence. Pursuing this strange metaphor, which (they reiterated) was almost wholly inadequate to the unspeakable facts, they declared that the faint, diffused glow emitted by each separate snowflake universe, resolved itself in closer, microscopic inspection, into a myriad instantaneous scintillations, each one a short-lived world’s bright climax of spiritual lucidity. Overhead there was nothing but the blinding darkness, whence ‘the flakes vacillated groundwards. Such was the bleak image by which the forwards tried to express their new and dreadful vision. They also discussed the implications of the repugnant truth, and the policy which the human race should adopt towards it. One and all, they affirmed their continued loyalty to the spirit. ‘Every man,’ they said, ‘knows in his own experience that the life of love and of intelligence is good absolutely, is the only satisfying life for awakened beings. No devastating discovery about the nature of the ultimate reality can shake that immediate perception. Therefore, whatever the prospect, the human race will continue the struggle for love and intelligence here on earth. But it would be foolish to pretend that our metaphysical discovery makes no difference. Formerly it seemed that man would soon make contact with the life-giving and enheartcning source of all spirit. We have found only desolation.’ But the forwards did not leave matters thus. They suggested also a hope and a policy. The hope lay in the fact that, after all, the snowstorm of

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  One of the main factors in the waning of the will for the light in this period was the attitude of the intellectuals. The academics, musicians, painters, cinema-artists, and, above all, the writers flagrantly betrayed their trust. In all these groups there were persons of four types. Many were paid servants of the government, engaged on propaganda through work which was ostensibly independent. These were concerned chiefly to put a good complexion on the regime, and to praise the fundamental principles of the synthetic faith, in particular the virtues of acquiescence and obedience, and the ecstasy of cruelty. Still more numerous were the independent but futile intellectual ostriches who shut their eyes to the horror of their time and won adulation and power by spinning fantasies of self-aggrandizement and sexual delight, distracting men’s attention from contemporary evils with seductive romances of other ages and other worlds, or with exalted and meaningless jargon about a life after death. There were also large numbers of progressive intellectuals. These saw clearly enough that contemporary society was mortally sick, and in a dream-like, unearnest way they expounded their tenuous Utopias, in which there was often much common sense and even wisdom; but they preached without that fury of conviction which alone can rouse men to desperate action. And they themselves lived comfortably upon the existing system, in their flats and suburban houses. Vaguely they knew that they ought to give up all for the revolution; but being what they were, they could not. The fourth type were the very few sincere and impotent rebels, who flung away their lives in vain and crazy attempts to be great prophets. Crucial to the fate of the human race at this time was the attitude of the class of technicians, the host of highly trained engineers, electricians, aeronautical experts, agricultural experts, and scientific workers in industry. These, if they could have formed a clear idea of the plight of the race, might

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  an ordeal by torture. According to the synthetic faith, it will be remembered, the supreme ecstasy was to be experienced under torture. The challenger would suggest to the dervish that they should both, in public and at once, inflict severe pain on themselves, or be tortured by a third party. The mere challenge was often enough to expose the impostor. But when dervishes who had been specially chosen and handsomely paid for their ability to endure pain undertook to prove their faith under torture, it soon appeared that the missionaries could draw upon some source of strength inaccessible to hired martyrs. The missionary could allow his flesh to be torn or crushed to a far greater extent, and in doing so he made no false claim that he enjoyed it. Though he rejoiced in the opportunity to bear witness to his faith through pain, he took no delight, he said, in pain itself. The dervish, on the other hand, would make agonized protestations of delight, until suddenly, and sooner than his rival, he called out for release. The governments did, indeed, gain a temporary success by sending out dervishes who had been specially prepared for the inevitable ordeal by having an arm permanently anaesthetized. But it was not long before the trick was exposed. The next move by the imperialists was to organize ‘spontaneous’ lynchings of those who dared to challenge the dervishes. But this policy also was defeated, partly by the courage of the missionaries, partly by highly trained crowd- controllers who by shrewd interjections often succeeded in turning the temper of the mob from sadism to kindliness. The source of the courage of the missionaries was, of course, their faith in the spirit. But courage alone might not have achieved so swift and complete a discomfiture of the synthetic faith had it not been reinforced by a sly and friendly ridicule. There was nothing new in the method of the missionaries; but never before had it been used on such a scale and with such expert psychological understanding. And never before had those who

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• Sirius (1944) democratizes the numinous — a dog re-derives the Mighty Other by scent: “not I should devour it, but it would devour me,” and resolves on the lecture’s practice-test: “I am going to be the hound of the spirit.” Wartime despair darkens the salute — though the trail leads, in the book’s own words, “not to the universal Tiger but to the universal Master” (it is the human herd, not the Other, that kills the hound) — and affirmation contracts to the smallest possible community: his dying “Plaxy-Sirius — worth while.” The novel also openly indicts elitist misreadings of superhumanism as proto-fascist: Stapledon auditing his own 1935 book. The biography roots the book’s imaginative method in the oldest layer of the life: the Port Said fox-terrier Rip, “with whom he was frequently photographed in Egypt.” Asked by Mitchison in 1944 why he had written such a book, Stapledon called it “a sort of distorted act of piety toward that former but never quite forgotten beloved”; and Crossley points to the Last Men in London passage where the friendship is already theorized — by long experience of the terrier the boy “learned to enter into imaginative sympathy with a mind that was not human,” which drove into him “a sense of the kinship of all living things and a sense of their differences.” His verdict: “Set exclusively in Wales and England, Sirius nonetheless has the deepest Egyptian roots of all Stapledon’s books.” The imaginative entry into nonhuman minds — the muscle the lecture’s “every kind of object” catalogue exercises (§2.6(b)) — was trained, on the biography’s account, decades before philosophy touched it.
  Sirius (1944) ↗ · ¶ 137 · ¶ 138 · ¶ 234 — quoted passages in context

  distance between myself and the quarry, the scent grew clearer and more compelling. “At last a terrible thing happened. As I drew nearer, the quality of the heavenly quarry seemed to change. Though its exquisite sweetness remained, drawing me on, a new, pungent tang, a stinging, choking, bitter, exquisite and terrifying perfume, was mixed with it. There was something in it that made my mind reel, as the chloroform had done; and something fierce, like the mighty smells of tiger and lion, but with a grimness that no earthly smell ever had. I could not give up the chase. With staggering mind I still clung to the trail. The thing that I was hunting must surely be the source of all fragrance in the universe, and all horror also. And I was famished for the thing. I must, must reach it; though in the end surely not I should devour it, but it would devour me. Surely the thing that I was crazily hunting must be the very thing that men called God, the dear and beautiful and dread. “At last it was as though the quarry turned at bay and overwhelmed me. Remembering, I cannot recapture that moment of agony and bliss, the agony of my slaughtered self, the bliss of the freed spirit in me. It was as though — how can I put it? — as though the trail which had first promised the most succulent prey, and then the most formidable but spell-binding enemy, had led after all not to the universal Tiger but to the universal Master, the superhuman master whom my super-canine nature so desperately needed to take possession of me and steady me with his claim for absolute loyalty and service. “That supreme moment passed. I can remember only that when it passed I found peace such as I had not known before and shall never, I believe, quite lose. The whole universe now presented itself with a new quality, as though my monochrome vision had suddenly gained the glory of colour.

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  But the colours that I saw were not of sensation. They were the colours that are seen by the eye of the spirit. All the things and people that I had seen hitherto in the plain greys of ordinary life were now enriched with a great diversity of the new quality which I am calling colour, so that they gained a new meaning, much as sounds gain a new meaning in speech or music. I saw them all in their own true colours and suffused with the music of the whole. And even now, on the day after my glorious moment, which is lost save for its afterglow in my mind, I still see everything coloured by the light of the spirit.” There followed a postscript. “All this was written on the day after my vision, if vision it was. And now another day has passed. I have read it over, and I see that it does not describe at all the thing that happened to me. It is sentimental verbiage. It does not recapture the experience for me, it blurs it. But I am certain that something big really did happen to me. And the proof shall be shown in my life. I will take charge of my life. I will drift no more. I will still be true to science, but I will be true to my new light also. I will be a sceptic about everything but one thing, which does not admit of scepticism (once one has clearly seen it), namely that it does indeed matter to be as quickened a spirit as possible, and to live for the quickening of the spirit everywhere. In fact I am going to be the hound of the spirit. Me? Lazy, excuse-finding me? That’s a good joke, isn’t it! Looking at the matter with scientific detachment, I am sure I shall be adrift again before the week is out. Well, even if I am, the thing that happened the night before last will make a difference. And looking at it all in the light of the thing — no, by God! I shall never be adrift again! Not fundamentally.” With much misgiving Sirius dutifully offered this document to Thomas. Would he be amused, or annoyed? Or would he take it with all his aloof

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  dog had not been immediately stopped. The badly damaged animal had staggered off towards the mountains, but shock and loss of blood had at last brought him down. With the first-aid outfit that she had carried on all her searches she put a pad on the wound and contrived to pass a bandage round his body to hold it, though he trembled with the added pain. Then she said, “I must go and get help and a stretcher.” He protested, with feeble earnestness; and when she rose to go, he cried piteously for her to come down to him again. In despair she sank beside him, and lay down to put her face to his cheek. “But, my darling,” she said, “we must get you home before daylight, else they’ll find you.” He feebly cried again, and seemed to say, “Dying — stay — Plaxy — dear.” Presently he said “Dying — is very — cold.” She took off her coat and laid it over him, then tried to lie closer to him to warm him. He said something which she guessed to be, “I don’t fit you. Robert does.” Stabbed with love and compassion, she said, “But dearest darling, our spirits fit.” His last words were “Plaxy-Sirius — worth while.” Some minutes later she saw his mouth fall open a little, revealing the white teeth in the faint light of dawn. His tongue slipped out. She buried her face in the strong fur of his neck, silently weeping. For a long while she lay, till discomfort forced her to move. Then a shuddering sigh heaved her body, a sigh of bitter grief, but also of exhaustion; of love and compassion, but also of relief. Presently she realized that she was deadly cold and shivering. She sat up and rubbed her bare arms. Gently she took away the coat from dead Sirius, and put it on herself once more. The act seemed callous, and she wept again; then stooped once more to give the great head a kiss. For a while she sat by Sirius with a hand in the side pocket of her coat. She found that her fingers had closed upon the little field-glass that I had given her. Even this seemed

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  Crossley, Speaking for the Future (1994) ↗ · ¶ 265 · ¶ 267 — quoted passages in context

  To Olaf, Willie began sending a weekly typed letter, telling him of doings at the Canal and expressing his anxiety lest his son forget him. “I wonder will you think of Father today,” or “Think of Fa a bit sometimes and of the happy times we had together here,” he wrote plaintively.[36] Those happy times resurfaced decades later in Stapledon’s late-blooming literary career. Although he lived in Port Said for only five years (excluding a few visits in the mid-1890s and a four-month nostalgic return at the age of twenty-six), the stream of letters from his father between 1891 and 1901 not only kept his impressions vivid but mythologized those young years when all three members of his little family were together. The boy’s telescopic visions “of a universe that teemed with suns and inhabited worlds” bore fruit four decades later in the great cosmic inquiries of the 1930s, *Last and First Men* and *Star Maker*. The international assortment of characters in his 1935 utopia *Odd John* is explicitly linked to Port Said, “the most cosmopolitan spot in all the world.”[37] But the novel closest to Olaf’s Egyptian memories is an extraordinary fantasy, overtly based on genetic experiments performed in the early 1940s by C. H. Waddington. *Sirius* is the story of a dog chemically and surgically altered with a large brain of human dimensions. When Naomi Mitchison asked him in 1944 why he had written such a book, at once bizarre and improbably moving, he replied, “I was brought up with a rather intelligent fox-terrier in Egypt, and this book profited by that quite a lot. In fact it now seems to me a sort of distorted act of piety toward that former but never quite forgotten beloved.”[38] The author’s explanation did not tell the whole truth about *Sirius* and the “beloved” that inspired it, but he traced the wellsprings of imagination all the way back to a five-year-old’s first visionary gleams. His pet dog Rip, with whom he was frequently photographed in Egypt and to whom he sent numerous childish notes enclosed in his own letter to his father, was often named by the adult Stapledon when he talked about *Sirius*. He told an audience in Manchester in 1947 that his novel had been inspired by an early “vision,” and he sketched that insight into “the aliveness of all living things” in his partly autobiographical *Last Men in London* (1932):

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  Set exclusively in Wales and England, *Sirius* nonetheless has the deepest Egyptian roots of all Stapledon's books. The young boy photographed with his terrier sitting upright at the table is father to the man who imagined a sheep dog raised as a human child in a Welsh family.

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  Last Men in London (1932) ↗ · ¶ 106 — quoted passage in context

  he believed that this creature had a mind much more like his own mind than was actually the case; but also, by long experience of this animal, he learned to enter into imaginative sympathy with a mind that was not human. This canine friendship drove deep into his own mind and heart both a sense of the kinship of all living things and a sense of their differences. Though Jack could enter into a romp, he could never be induced to play trains. Nor could he be persuaded that rabbits were beings like himself, whose lives should be respected. Paul himself, of course, had to make that discovery; but even in his earliest fly-tormenting and beetle-crushing phase he was already making it. Later there came a stage when this mystery of alien lives was his chief absorption and his chief perplexity. He would watch ants toiling through the grass-jungle with food for the public store, or ‘talking’ to one another as they met on one of their highways, or fighting to the death in organized battle. Always, of course, he imputed far too much of human intelligence to these strange beings. But even when at a much later date he discovered this error, he remained firm in his sense of their fundamental community with himself. Even worms, exploring the soil with their blind noses, seemed to him infinitely more like himself than the soil they devoured. And when one of them was snapped up by a thrush, Paul suffered an agony of indecision, debating whether to save the worm or let the bird have its dinner in peace. When he saw a cat with a mouse, he rushed indignantly to the rescue; yet somehow, after the event, he fell to wondering if he had merely been meddlesome. In short, during this phase of his growth he was overwhelmed with what some would call a mystical apprehension of the inner being of all living things, and shocked by their insensitivity to one another, their essential harmfulness to one another. He was troubled by the fact that he himself ate meat and wore leather boots, and amazed that even kind-hearted persons,

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• Death into Life (1946) restates sheet 28 almost verbatim at cosmic scale — “I, though loyal utterly to the clear Spirit that is my essence, salute also, and compulsively, him, the Other. And yet I must for ever doubt whether these two are in fact several or identical. Spirit I humbly know, but what is Thou?” — the 1934 double loyalty, now carrying an identity-doubt the notes never wrote down — and radicalizes it past the point where goodness can even be predicated of the object: “Were I to condemn, yet must I adore.”
  Death into Life (1946) ↗ · ¶ 96 · ¶ 139 — quoted passages in context

  conceived to reveal him. Knowing at least what the Other was not, the spirit of Man seemed to know in a way what he in fact was; yet knew of his actual nature nothing save his bare and terrible otherness. He was not Ra nor Siva nor Chronos nor Jaweh nor Jesus. Nor yet (the thought startled him with bewilderment, almost with vertigo) could it be said for certain even that the dark Other was identical with the Spirit, that he was the perfection of all intelligence, love and creative will. For these, which for the spirit of Man and for all finite spirits of every rank must needs be sacred, might perhaps in the Other be transcended. Considering thus, the spirit of Man, even in the agony of his body’s conflict, cried out to the Other, ‘Oh, Thou, Thou, Thou!’ but then fell dumb. Presently in his heart he whispered, ‘How should I, his small and lowly creature, address him; how make contact with him? Stars and galaxies declare him, atoms and electrons manifest him. Every insect, every sparrow, every wild flower proves him. Men in all their ways, both good and evil, fatally express him. And I, though loyal utterly to the clear Spirit that is my essence, salute also, and compulsively, him, the Other. And yet I must for ever doubt whether these two are in fact several or identical. Spirit I humbly know, but what is Thou? Dazzling darkness in the eyes! Shattering silence!’ THE REAR-GUNNER AGAIN Convinced of his impotence in regard to the Other, the spirit of Man turned once more to consider the Spirit, the more familiar, more intelligible divinity, which so insistently and unmistakably claimed his service. But could that be called a divinity which, it might well be, was no personal consciousness beyond his own personality but sheerly an imperious ideal claiming his allegiance, perhaps quite irrationally? Was this ideal implanted in him by the Other, to be the law of his being, though not, perhaps, of the Other’s own being at all? He could not know. But with no

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  CHAPTER VII -SALVATION THE SPIRIT OF MAN GRIEVES FOR MAN THE REAR-GUNNER, AND OTHERS THE SPIRIT OF MAN GRIEVES FOR MEN THE Spirit of Man is daunted by his station on the middle heights of the great hierarchy of being. Above him rise range upon range of spirits, up to the universal Spirit; and beyond, even beyond the very Spirit whose essence is intelligence and love and gallant creating, towers the veiled, the inconceivable Other. The spirit of Man is daunted by the knowledge that he himself, like men and women, must in due season die. And yet, contemplating his death, he finds full peace in the expectation that his life must give some slight enrichment to loftier beings than himself, and finally to the very Spirit. But then, looking downward upon the myriad little individuals alive or dead, on earth and on the host of worlds, he sees that very few of them are capable of that peace; so fettered is each one to his own individuality, fearing extinction as a child the dark. Compassion stabs the spirit of Man on account of the littleness, the helplessness, the cruel frustration and torment, of the swarms of these minute abortively personal beings. Hot protest surges suddenly in him against the Other, who seemingly permits this misery. But then, remembering the glimpsed high peak of being, the cold, the fair, the dread, he whispers in his own heart, ‘Thou! Oh, Thou! Your little short-lived creature scorns to judge you. And yet — could I but see, but feel, your will’s rightness! But Thou! Were I to condemn, yet must I adore.’

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• The Flames (1947) names the Other with Otto’s own term (“the Wholly Other, and wholly unintelligible”), exposes cosmic theism as projection (the cosmical mind’s longed-for divine Lover proves “nothing more than her own spectre reflected from the confines of existence”), and makes agnostic piety a persecuted minority creed whose spokesman is killed — a startlingly pessimistic self-assessment of the lecture’s audience-share. The frame sharpens the pessimism: the novella is a long letter from “Cass” (Cassandra, the disbelieved prophet) to “Thos” (a doubting Thomas), and it is the frame narrator himself who passes verdict on the very compromise the lecture spent an evening defending: “To me, the compromise seems hopelessly confused and untenable.” Stapledon built a refutation of his own position into the book’s architecture and gave it the last calm word.
  The Flames (1947) ↗ · ¶ 76 · ¶ 79 — quoted passages in context

  Ages passed, and still the longed-for illumination and communion did not occur. Instead a different and a shattering discovery was made by the cosmical mind; that is, of course, by all the awakened individuals together in spiritual unity. What this discovery was I find it very difficult to determine at all precisely, and still more difficult to describe. This is not surprising. All I can say is that at a certain stage of cosmical history, probably about the time of the first appearance of mammals on the earth, the cosmical mind began to suspect that all the treasured evidence for the existence of the Divine Lover, and the impending consummation of the whole cosmical process, was false. “The cosmical spirit,” said Cass, “had cried out for love; and some kind of seeming-response had come back to it, seemingly from the heart of reality; but actually, this response was a mere echo of the cosmical mind’s own yearning. Having pressed through the mists of uncertainty, confident that she would soon stand in the divine presence, she found nothing more than her own spectre reflected from the confines of existence.” It is easy to see that a society orientated toward a personal deity, a god of love, and organized through and through as a theocracy, would be rudely shaken by this discovery; the more so since all its members believed in an actual and speedy union with their God. But worse was to follow. In forlorn hope of reaching some deeper truth, further exploration was undertaken. “Finally” (in Cass’s words so far as I can remember them) “the cosmical spirit came at last face to face with stark reality. And stark it certainly turned out to be. Reality, it seemed, was wholly alien to the spirit, and wholly indifferent to the most sacred values of the awakened minds of the cosmos. It was indeed the Wholly Other, and

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  years at a time the faithful ruled, then the sceptics. Sometimes there was an uneasy compromise. And sometimes the two parties so far debased themselves as to invent and use methods of violence. War was at last known on the sun. When the terrestrial flames re-established contact with the sun, they found the solar society in painful confusion. Warfare was being attempted. But some sort of new party, I understand, had very recently appeared. It claimed to offer an effective synthesis of the views of the old parties. This new party, or sect, or what you will, professed views much like those of the terrestrial flame whom Cass had murdered; for they embraced both metaphysical agnosticism and loyalty to “the spirit.” “We do not know, we do not know,” they declared (or so Cass asserted), “and probably no finite intelligence, even of cosmical stature, can ever know, the ultimate truth. But we do not really need to know. All that is needful is the perception, the indubitable perception, of the spirits” over- mastering beauty; and the perceived certainty that we are all by nature instruments of the spirit’s expression.” Cass quoted these words with fervour and obvious agreement. Indeed, he presently announced that they had won his allegience to the new party. To me, the compromise seems hopelessly confused and untenable, but Cass took it very seriously. He said, “Intellectual integrity, my dear man, is all very well; and it does compel us to be entirely agnostic about the constitution of the universe. But emotional integrity is just as important; and it compels me to be true to my perception of the spirit.” In this attitude, rather surprisingly, he found himself out of sympathy with the latest views of the terrestrial flames, who (he said) were at first thrown into chaos by all this momentous news, but were now rapidly moving toward theism. Apparently the majority took the view that, though hitherto they had

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• A Man Divided (1950), his last novel, novelizes the 1946 epistemology (the “awake” vs “somnolent” self) as autobiography, states the creed nearly verbatim in a WEA classroom scene — “certainty about the universe — No! Impossible! Let’s just be humble about it, and reverently agnostic” — and gives the double loyalty its most compact formulation anywhere in Stapledon: “there’s a time for protest, and a time for acceptance. But best is to do both at once, always.” The awake Victor’s last letter fuses the two: struggle against evil in action, “and yet in contemplation… worship is wrung from us, we cannot but accept, and with joy.”
  A Man Divided (1950) ↗ · ¶ 189 · ¶ 65 · ¶ 226 — quoted passages in context

  of it.” The class had already tumbled to it that he was brighter than usual, and there was an unmistakable air of expectancy in the room. I noticed that the various corrections and qualifications that Victor made to his own earlier statements were all such as to give a more balanced view, and a view less easily acceptable to the class. Evidently the Dolt had been accustomed to take the line of least resistance by allowing a good many extravagant Leftist pronouncements to go unanswered, and even by pandering to such opinions in his lectures. The awake Victor, though in some ways far more to the Left in politics than the Dolt, would not tolerate unfair or uncritical propaganda. On this occasion he had a passage of arms with an ardent Communist who was outraged that Victor should now be anxious to insist that there had been much real good-heartedness and self-sacrificing social work among employers. The young man rose and made a formal protest, deploring “this change of heart in our respected tutor “, and plainly hinting that Victor had to talk like that for fear of losing his job. Victor laughed, and then let himself go on the subject of over-simplifying history and human nature for the sake of a theory which was largely true but not the whole truth. He turned the incident to good account by a short statement on the terrific complexity of the universe, and the fact that none of the great questions could be properly answered, because they were all at bottom false questions. Always what we had to do was to ask new and subtler questions. When someone remarked, “Yes, but we must have some certainty to live by,” Victor said, “You can’t have it, and it’s no use pretending.” Then he corrected himself and said, “You can find in your own heart the only certainty that matters, namely that the way of community, of love and friendliness, is good, and that we must strive to live that way if we are to fulfil our nature. But certainty about the universe — No! Impossible! Let’s just be humble about it, and reverently agnostic.”

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  suppose he did, but his far-away look seemed to focus on the ugly waitress, who was serving at the other end of the room. At last he said, “I can only repeat that something universal in me protested against my individual cowardice. Or perhaps it was as though the little ordinary ‘I’ woke to be the universal ‘I’ for a few minutes. I woke to be something more than Victor, even the awakened Victor. Did I? I wonder!” Before I could ask him to pursue the explanation, he continued. “This affair, of course, put me in the limelight. I was recommended for a Victoria Cross. But I never got it, because of subsequent events. You see, after that show, I remained awake for some months, carrying on with my job in a mood of glorious detachment and amusement, much as an adult may enter into a children’s game. For in my prevailing mood at that time I generally felt as though I were an actor; yes, an actor playing a part in a children’s game, entering into it with immense zest, but enjoying it mainly out of a nostalgia for my own long-lost childhood. In fact I was playing at soldiers, keeping the rules meticulously, but always with secret amusement. I never really cared which side won, so long as the game itself was interesting.” “But, Victor,” I interrupted, “you were not like that when I knew you. You took sides. You did care which side won. You once said you were on the side of the light, against darkness.” He laughed, and replied, cryptically, “My dear fellow, there’s a time for protest, and a time for acceptance. But best is to do both at once, always. But that, believe me, takes some doing. And I had still to learn it. You’ll see.” He paused again, and I urged him to go on with the story. “Well,” he said, “I was an immense success with the children. I played soldiers so well that they too played better. They had been flagging, poor boys, because they

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  Strange how, in the light of the Whole, the ugly thing itself borrows beauty! Not that we should therefore tolerate it or preserve it; for its virtue lies in its ugliness, in its failure to be beautiful. And the same of evil. In the light of the Whole it is transfigured, redeemed. Not that it is therefore to be tolerated; for its virtue dies in its essential badness, in its tragic failure to be good. In action, our allegiance to the spirit obliges us to struggle with all our strength against evil; and yet in contemplation, when the majestic pregnancy of the Whole obscurely reveals itself to us, and worship is wrung from us, we cannot but accept, and with joy. “Inevitably the horror of our civilization and of the whole universe, drives the poor blind Dolt to suicide. But that is not what it does to me.. This vulgar little drawing, the whole vulgar tragedy of our civilization — though in action I oppose them all with all my strength, in contemplation 1 find myself accepting them reverently, perhaps quite irrationally. I respect them as I respect a man struggling against a mortal disease or incipient insanity. Because everywhere the spirit shows through, struggling for the light, and yet fatally slipping, slipping, farther down into darkness. To hell with the poor Dolt’s death-wish, where indeed it belongs. My wish is wholly for life, life eternal, not just for my own little individuality, which is essentially and rightly ephemeral, but for the spirit that is the perennial and Cosmical music inherent in the lives of all ephemeral individuals. “Maggie is all the while with me in my study. For I must have all I can of her, and she of me, while it is possible. She is sewing. Her needle moves in and out of the material as she takes up a needleful of stitches. It’s like a line of little glistening porpoises threading across a white sea. My life with her has been like that — in and out, in and out. Latterly, alas, mostly out. And now all our intermittent days, weeks, months, and our too few years, come crowding into memory. I examine the stitches of our past. So

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• The short fiction keeps miniaturizing the same gesture. In “Arms Out of Hand” (1947) the salute becomes a literal, involuntary physical act — the divided man’s rebel arm “extended itself slowly toward the darkness, toward the star… There was no mistaking the gesture. It expressed salutation, self-surrender, peace.” In “Old Man in New World” (1944) the world revolution is led by “agnostic mystics” who “didn’t pledge themselves to any beliefs about the ultimate reality” yet know “the struggle for the light was the real meaning and purpose of all conscious existence” — and a licensed Fool interrupts the world-president to ask the stars “why, why, why are we here?” — answering himself: “Weak we are, and blind, but the Unseen makes music with us.” (The consoling reprise, “the living music that is man,” is the President’s closing line to the crowd after the Fool withdraws — the officeholder translating the Fool’s answer back into humanism.) And the posthumous Four Encounters dialogues pit the narrator’s agnostic piety against a Christian, a scientist, a mystic and a Marxist in turn — containing perhaps the most perfect single sentence of the whole doctrine, a prayer that cancels itself: “Oh, let my heart strongly feel that presence, but let my mind be utterly silent before it. For even if I say, ‘Thou! Oh, Thou,’ I say too much.” Against the mystic’s withdrawal the narrator states the lecture’s alternative: “Let me live somehow in the two worlds at once… his goal is no cosmical panorama from a summit… his goal is the climbing” — with the cosmos held “in sidelong glances only.”
  short fiction ↗ · ¶ 69 · ¶ 34 · ¶ 35 · ¶ 47 · ¶ 48 · ¶ 132 · ¶ 180 · ¶ 181 — quoted passages in context

  and looked into the darkness. Between the tops of two great commercial buildings across the street there was a patch of sky and one bright star. The left arm extended itself slowly toward the darkness, toward the star. The back of the hand was uppermost, the fingers were loosely spread. For a moment the arm remained stationary, then slowly sank to his side. There was no mistaking the gesture. It expressed salutation, self-surrender, peace. For a full half-minute Sir James gazed in silence at the star. Like others, he accepted intellectually the vastness and mystery of the universe, but emotionally he rebelled against it. In that half-minute he had a new experience, one which he certainly could not have described adequately. “The heavens declare,” he whispered, but could not finish the quotation; for a sudden sense of the pitiful inadequacy of human language silenced him. “Beauty, mystery, love,” he said, “and terror too! And all, all must be accepted, gladly, by the heart.” But no sooner had he said this than he was frightened. Could he be going quite mad? Horror must be accepted? Now the star became merely a symbol of the brute power and brainless immensity of the material universe. It seemed to him that in such a universe there was no place for divine love. His faith crumbled away, and he was left with utter negation and hate. In a sudden passion of self-assertion, he clenched his right fist and raised it against the star. But then his left hand rose and gently stroked the raised fist, soothing it downwards, until it subsided into quietness. For a moment peace returned to him; a peace which did indeed pass understanding, since it seemed to him irrational that this sense of immensity and mystery, and of the inadequacy of his faith, should rouse him to any emotion but horror. Interpreting this strange experience as another trick of Satan, he reached out impatiently with his right hand and drew the curtain, shutting out the night. Once more he sat down at his desk and covered his

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  “Well, so what?” said the pilot, with a secret smile. “What? Well, you know as well as I do. Added to everything else there was the terror of the coming World-War. And stratosphere rocket-planes and subatomic bombs promised something far worse than the last war.” “But,” the young man interrupted, “the Third World War never happened. Why? You’re forgetting something very important. You’re forgetting that when both sides were mobilizing, and the war was due at any minute, something happened that would have been impossible at any other stage of history. You remember how government propaganda for the war never really caught on, on either side; and how at the critical moment an extraordinary popular clamour against war and against social robotism broke out on both sides. Who was really responsible for that? Why, the new ‘agnostic mystics,’ of course. They started the world strike in America and Russia. Decades earlier, the pacifists had tried to stop war by popular protest, but they failed miserably, because conditions were not ripe. But the new group, who weren’t strictly pacifists at all but social revolutionaries with a religious motive — they found conditions ripe, and they did the trick. Obviously you must know that story, how everyone downed tools and was ready to die for the new hope. Thousands must have been imprisoned, hundreds shot. But presently the governments found their armed forces were mutinying. Then came the American Revolution and the big change in Russia. The driving force, as you must surely know, was an odd assortment of airmen, skilled workers, and — the agnostic mystics. You ignore those modern saints, but it was those that inspired the whole movement and kept it going. Remember, of course, that for many decades a big change had been slowly going on deep down in people’s minds. It had begun away back in the First War and made steady progress through the inter-war period, but it was never effective till after the Second War. It came to a head among the

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  young fighters in that war, particularly among the airmen, and also among all the oppressed peoples of Europe, and in the occupied parts of Russia and China, and later in broken-down Britain. These two very different groups, the fighters and the broken, rediscovered the power of comradeship, as the Russians had done in their first Revolution. But this time it was discovered with far deeper consciousness of its meaning. So much had happened since that earlier awakening. This time it developed into a purged and clarified will for the light, as you yourself called it; a will for a more fully human way of living, for intelligence, and other-respecting community, and for creative action in all human affairs.” “Not much new in that,” interposed the old man. “Oh yes, there was,” said the junior, “it was a moral passion for this way of living as an absolute good, not just as a means to social prosperity. It was mystical, too, because though these people didn’t pledge themselves to any beliefs about the ultimate reality, and were mostly outside all organized religion, they felt with complete certainty that in some way, which they couldn’t state intellectually at all, the struggle for the light was the real meaning and purpose of all conscious existence. And in keeping themselves in severe training for that struggle they found — well, ‘the peace that passeth all understanding.’ It was this new attitude, this humbly agnostic, yet deeply mystical, feeling, that broke the spell of disillusion and spread like a fire from heart to heart.” The old man had been shifting restlessly in his seat, and now he expostulated. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! What are you getting at? This mystical feeling, as you call it, was just the subjective side of the objective pressure of circumstances, which forced people to see that they must stand together or perish. Of course, I know your mystics mostly came in on the right side, and that they provided a lot of heartening though questionable

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  The supreme incident was still to come. It was one which showed by its obvious power over the assembled multitude the extraordinary change that had come over mankind within a few decades. No earlier populace could have understood, still less have been so profoundly moved by, a symbol of such austere significance. The President of the World was at the height of his speech. He had been dilating upon the incredible improvement in the fortunes of the common man in all lands, and glorifying the achievement and the promise of the human species under its new regime. He was, of course, frequently interrupted by applause. After the most vociferous of these outbursts, at the very moment when silence had been restored and the President was about to continue, the Fool stepped up to him, laid a hand on his shoulder and gently ousted the surprised orator from the microphone. Most startling fact of all, the President, with an awkward smile, acquiesced. And no one interfered. Then the Fool, confronting the microphone, spoke to the world, “Happy, happy beings!” he said, and his quiet voice was now for the first time heard. “Happy, happy beings! But death dogs you. Conquerors of a world, but of a sand-grain among the stars! We are mere sparks that flash and die. Even as a species we are upstart, sprung so lately from beasts and fishes; soon to vanish. After us our planet will spin for aeons, and nothing will remember us. Then why, why, why are we here?” He was silent. Throughout the Great Square there was a sound like a drift of air passing over a ripe cornfield. The whole populace had drawn in its breath. For a long moment the silence and the stillness continued, broken only by the quiet movement of the flags, and the sound of wings as a couple of pigeons settled in the Square. Then at last the Fool spoke again. “The stars give no answer. But within ourselves, and in one another, and in our unity together, the answer lies; for

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  in consciousness of our humanity we see deeper than through telescopes and microscopes. And from the depth of each one of us, and from our community together, a will arises; whence, we know not, but inexorable. ‘Live, oh fully live!’ it bids us. ‘To be aware, to love, to make — this is the music that I command of all my instruments. Let your sand-grain resound with a living flood of music; harmonious in itself, and harmonized with the song of all the spheres, which I alone can hear.’ Thus commands the will in us. And we, little human instruments, though death will surely hunt us down, and though our species is ephemeral, we shall obey. Weak we are, and blind, but the Unseen makes music with us.” Silence once more occupied the Great Square, and persisted. The ranked columns and the surrounding populace stood motionless, held by the Unseen. Then at last the Fool, with bowed head, withdrew from sight. And then the President, after a moment’s hesitation, returned to the microphone and said, “Our celebration has found an unexpected but a fitting climax. I will say no more but that your leaders, who are also your comrades, will go forward with you to make the living music that is man.” As the President retired, a murmur rose from the populace and soon swelled into an oceanic thunder of applause. When at last the noise had died down, the massed bands struck up the familiar strains of the world anthem, the “Song of Man,” while the whole great company stood at attention to sing. Then the columns, one by one, moved and wheeled, and flowed out of the Square, and the huge crowd of onlookers dispersed. In deep abstraction and perplexity the old man threaded his way along the congested streets, brooding on the strange scene that he had witnessed. To his shame he found that tears had spilled from his eyes. Oh yes, it was a great feat of stage-craft. One could not but be moved. But it was dangerous, and subtly false to the spirit of the Revolution. The President of the World,

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  all its harvest is flotsam. How should it possibly reach down to the beauties and horrors of the deep? Human reason, a fluttering moth, can never soar. Then what, I asked myself, was the appropriate attitude to the dark- bright, hideous-lovely Whole? Fear? Proud rebellion? Obsequious worship? Rather, I told myself, a difficult blend of acceptance in the heart and cold scrutiny in the mind. Acceptance, merely? For a moment the presence of the Whole, or of some greater thing beyond the Whole, seemed to bear down upon me in inconceivable majesty. My heart whispered, “Thou! Oh, Thou!” But immediately another thought, another prayer, was wrung from me. “Oh, let my heart strongly feel that presence, but let my mind be utterly silent before it. For even if I say, ‘Thou! Oh, Thou,’ I say too much.” Praying in this strange way, I laughed. Thereupon the Christian, mistaking my long silence and final bark of laughter, slipped his arm in mine and said, “My friend you have won through. Merciful Christ has saved you.” But at his touch I had stiffened, and now his arm retreated. Our eyes met, and for a long moment each searched the other. I was preparing to do battle against his proselytizing, and to conquer his faith. But his eyes checked me. For his Christ had indeed saved him from his self-loving despair; and without his Christ he might be lost. In his present state of partial waking (so I told myself, perhaps complacently) he could not endure the severer vision. So I said, “You have been very good to me, and very patient. But the upshot is that your way is not mine. You need belief; for me it is unnecessary. Without it I travel lighter, yes and perhaps farther. Strangely, in my unbelief I gain full peace, the peace that passes understanding. And joy too. I have found joy in the sheer given reality, with all its dark-bright

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  shadow, a veil of illusion drawn between him and the reality for which he yearned. I could not wholly doubt that the mystic had experienced some deep significant fact. Indeed, in my hesitant way I too had experienced something of it. But though logically his withdrawal might, I told myself, be justified by his supreme experience, I was repelled by his readiness to abandon the damned to their fate. Spirit, we had agreed, was for individuals in community. To withdraw from the concrete community which gave one individual being, even to withdraw for the sake of a future and better community, or even for the sake of the pure spirit itself, smacked of desertion. My heart protested, if our world is damned, let us all be damned together! And yet I had to admit that if his vision was indeed authentic and rightly interpreted, his course was right. And yet, and yet … This yearning for the reality behind appearance, this readiness to sacrifice the actual to the ideal, smacks unpleasantly of the blind old cult of progress, and faith in a far off millennium. That the heaven is to be had here and now, and eternally, makes no difference. Cosmical piety dictates that I, a finite and ephemeral being, shall not lust even for union with God or the universal spirit. If at heart, though unwittingly, I have that unity all the while, well, it is so. But to lust for it is surely an addiction, a greed, and the subtlest betrayal of the spirit. Rather, “my station and its duties.” But the mystic would reply, and not without reason, that this craving for union with God or the Whole was not a mere individual’s craving; it was the urge of God in him to wake wholly to his godhead. Well, let each of us be true to his own light. But for me there must be no withdrawal. Let me live somehow in the two world at once. Immersed in the temporal, let me nonetheless look with a far-seeing or an inner gaze on the eternal. Let me indeed see the eternal; but I must find it within the

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  temporal, not beyond. The grit and hardness of the rock under the climber’s fingers are not phantom. If he thinks them so, he is lost. Yes, and his goal is no cosmical panorama from a summit perhaps inaccessible; his goal is the climbing; to adapt himself, body and mind to objective reality, and thereby to express the spirit in him. This; but also (in sidelong glances only) to be as aware as may be of the depth below and the sky above, and the whole horizon of mountains. This, surely, is the truth that you and I together have conceived, each contributing. Is it not so? I found that the mystic had left his chair and was standing beside me, considering my face, and smiling. “My way,” he said, “is not yours; and yours, not mine. Be true to your own light, as I shall be to mine. There is a place for both our kinds.” Gently, he took my arm and led me to the door. OceanofPDF.com

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• The rare nonfiction and manuscript pieces (recovered July 2026 via the Crossley Reader) supply the missing first-person documents. “The Core” (1945), a meditation partly reused in Death into Life’s interludes, is the double loyalty in the nakedest first person anywhere in his prose: “I, the true I, will constantly to worship what for short I call the Spirit… But also I will, I must, salute without rebelliousness the dread Other who seemingly is behind the hugeness and the intricacy of the cosmos… who seemingly has spawned both light and darkness, both the Spirit and its enemy. Yet even with this perplexed salutation in my heart I will to strike for the Spirit only” — sheet 28 as private prayer, closing on “Dread, and to us unintelligible are the dark ways of the dark Other.” The same meditation holds the late identity-doubt in one breath: in love “I seem, I seem, to touch it; and to have assurance that even the dark, the alien Other is at heart spirit… Or so it seems, it seems. I must not positively believe it, for to do so would be to betray intellect’s integrity.” “The Peak and the Town” (mid-1940s; rejected by the editor Peter Albery on 5 November 1946 — “Albery found the allegory too obscure and asked for something else” — the month of the Conway Hall return, §3.8) is the double loyalty as full allegory — Revolution in the town, vision on the Peak — resolved by a crazy-wise watch-repairer who teaches literal doubleness: “There is no satisfactory life but the double life… When you are in the factory or the office or the political meeting or facing the firing squad, you will also see the hills” (with the A Man Divided warning that in the double life “the chances of death are doubled,” and a Palace of New Knowledge where cosmic awe is “mistaken… for worship” — sheet 25 again). The unfinished “Letters to the Future” (late 1940s) preach “a radical Worldliness” to his unborn great-grandson — “it is the world, and not his soul, that claims a man’s attention and his care”; otherworldliness is “the great treason” — while defining true religion as “an enthusiastic readiness to adopt whatever in fact is the appropriate attitude to the real as a whole,” and restating the immortality-detachment with the check that is pure Stapledon: the soul is “but a tone in a more excellent music, which would be marred were its individual sounds not to follow one another into silence… But these moments perhaps lie.” And the 1947 French lecture “Mankind at the Crossroads” takes the dialectic geopolitical — America and Russia each fanatical about a “half-truth” (individuality; community) — before ending on the platform Hail: “Hail! Oh unseen, inaccessible, unimaginable comrades!… The spirit itself alone, whatever its cosmical status, gives meaning to our lives.”
  rare pieces (1908–49) ↗ · ¶ 368 · ¶ 369 · ¶ 384 · ¶ 370 · ¶ 287 · ¶ 289 · ¶ 264 · ¶ 411 · ¶ 410 · ¶ 460 · ¶ 454 · ¶ 445 · ¶ 447 · ¶ 230 · ¶ 250 — quoted passages in context

  But to be coldly aware is not in itself enough. I will also right appraisement: to loathe where loathing is indeed due, to love where love is due, to worship where it is right to worship. I loathe the urchin's cruelty to the cat, but I will not loathe the urchin. I loathe Hitler's mass-torturing, but not Hitler; and the money-man's heartlessness, but not the man. I love the swallow's flight, and I love the swallow; the urchin's gleam of tenderness, and the urchin. And I, the true I, will constantly to worship what for short I call the Spirit, fountain of all clear awareness, all love, and all brave creating. But also I will, I must, salute without rebelliousness the dread Other who seemingly is behind the hugeness and the intricacy of the cosmos, behind the star-streams and the facets of a bee's eye, behind the vast finitude of space and the mystery of the electron's leap; that most alien Other, who seemingly has spawned both light and darkness, both the Spirit and its enemy.

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  Yet even with this perplexed salutation in my heart I will to strike for the Spirit only, and with all my strength, however feebly.

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  Dread, and to us unintelligible are the dark ways of the dark Other.

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  The great reality that confronts me is formidable and veiled. Its heart is not laid bare in the electron, nor is its form displayed in the huge dance of the galaxies. But there is one experience which seems, oh seems, to bring me near to it, and give insight into it. In love I seem, I seem, to touch it; and to have assurance that even the dark, the alien Other is at heart spirit. Telescopes and microscopes and tomes of sociology tell much, but superficially. Only in community with another living individual do I make an inner contact. For our relatedness is internal. Each is to the other an envoy from remote reality welcomed within the citadel of the self. Each is to the other the perceived angel of an ever inaccessible God. Or so it seems, it seems. I must not positively believe it, for to do so would be to betray intellect's integrity; but equally I must be true to the sharp, the insistent feeling that in loving I come near to the heart of things.

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  "There is no satisfactory life," he continued, "but the double life. You cannot be adequately a townsman unless you are also on the hills. For without the hill life we all succumb to fear and hate and blind partisanship. And in the long run this poisons the Revolution. Yet, to live on the hills without maintaining at the same time your town life, is loathsome egotism, leading to spiritual impoverishment and damnation. Live your two lives thoroughly, and in constant mutual intercourse. When you are in the factory or the office or the political meeting or facing the firing squad, you will also see the hills. Your thoughts and feelings will be sharpened by the mountain air, and your conduct will be sane. Yet also when you are contemplating the whole of things from some high ridge, you will be shoulder to shoulder with your fellow townsmen in the Underground, the cinema, the office, the workshop, the mine; or on the barricades, or wherever your affairs take you."

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  "At first," he said, "it really is rather difficult; but if you persevere you will gradually find that you are maintaining two separate but mentally contiguous existences. Spend a few days alternately in the town and in the country. While you are in the town, keep the country always firmly in mind; and while you are in the country, the town. Continue with this exercise until you find you have fully duplicated both your mind and your body. But I must warn you," he said with sudden urgency in his voice, "if you stumble into premature death in one of your lives, you will simultaneously die also in the other. So in the double life the chances of death are doubled."

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  After a while we came to a great white building of concrete and glass. At the door a notice said, "PALACE OF NEW KNOWLEDGE, Admission 6d." Some of us who had money to spare crowded through the turnstile, confident that we should gather useful information to help us on our way. Inside we were shown many amazing, many terrible, many beautiful things; and much that was tiresome, because we could not understand it. We looked down microscopes and into spectroscopes. We praised the delicate forms of diatoms, the crystalline fibre of rocks, the intricate thought-secreting tissues of brains. We learned all the mechanisms of human and animal bodies, from diagrams and from specimens in glass jars, and from living specimens with their inner organs displayed and working before our eyes. The interior life of the atom, that minutest dance-figure, that rippled pool, was brilliantly expounded to us, with its ultimate paradox that defeats intelligence. We saw, too, working models of the solar system, and of the galaxy; and symbols, obscure but pregnant, of the whole cosmos of galaxies. And when we contrasted the reputed size of the cosmos with the ultra-microscopic electron, we were filled with awe, which some of us mistook for worship. We were shown also, in parables, the human mind itself, dissected into its component mechanisms, according to the very latest theories. The intellectual surgery, also, of the most modern logic was displayed before us. We admired the use of verbal scalpels and probes, by which the hidden aberrations of thought are laid bare and excised. We were amazed, too, by the practical applications of the new knowledge, by the many mechanical inventions and innumerable specimens of synthetic products; the foods, textile fibres, new metals, plastics, architectural materials, with which, it was said, a synthetic new world was being rapidly built. In one well-guarded cellar (we were told) they were experimenting with a new secret power that could shatter the planet or give all men the bliss of gods. When we shuddered that so momentous a choice should be opened to man, the exponents declared that circumstances would in the end compel the right choice. But we feared still, knowing the folly, the madness lurking in our own hearts, and in all men's.

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  Did I so far lack humour as to preach to you, I think I should exhort you to a radical Worldliness. I should urge, not pietism, but a whole-hearted devotion to the world, yes and to the flesh and the devil; but especially to the flesh, which bears all our spiritual sky-scrapers on its back as a soldier bears lice, but also to the devil since he is in reality.

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  Do not fear that I shall urge you to seek God and save your soul, or preach a crusade against contraception or false teeth. Probably in your enlightenment you are as happily ignorant of these two latter clumsy but merciful dodges as you are emancipated from soul-saving and from the obsession with God. If not, for God's sake, sir, damn your soul and have done with it,-if you suppose yourself to have one; and so see the world more clearly, and enjoy it more shrewdly, and be more inclined to save it. For it is the world, and not his soul, that claims a man's attention and his care. It is this world of lands and seas, cornfields and cities, of jelly-fish and flies and chickweed, of pigs in their sties and roving gulls, of miners and profiteers and thinkers and screaming babies, of armies, trade unions, colleges, prisons, and panic-stricken nations, of electrons and multitudinous streams of suns, of applied maths and aesthetic and moral experience. What need to seek heaven for the ghost that a man supposes himself to be, when all these vivid and needy realities clamour around him?

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  The attitude which is more conventionally called "worldliness" is a care for certain things in this world at the expense of others. It is a care for sensory pleasures and personal triumph, and when it loves, it admires in the beloved, and seeks to enhance in the beloved, only these minor goods. "Otherworldliness" is an excessive revulsion from these goods called worldly and a yearning for a world utterly different in which they have no part whatever. It is a kind of nausea brought on by an over-indulgence in things good in themselves but not the only good. Gorged to the point of vomiting we may long for a world in which food has no part whatever. Nauseated with the cruder values, we long for a sphere of "pure spirit," and seek to withdraw ourselves from this foundering world as rats from a sinking ship. This surely is the great treason. The advance from worldliness (in the conventional sense) is not to unworldliness but to a more thorough worldliness, a care not only for the cruder values revealed in this world but also for all its finer excellences which we foolishly supposed could constitute a world apart.

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  There is indeed an attitude sometimes confused with otherworldliness which is not egoistical. The truly religious consciousness might be described as a vague surmise that beyond the world of common sense, beyond the needs of our neighbours and the needs of the awakening social whole of mankind, lie higher cosmical needs which man cannot yet clearly apprehend though he must keep his heart open to feel them. And to this account of the religious spirit we should perhaps add the even vaguer sense that behind the apparent distinction of good and evil lies the truth that reality, just as it is, is perfect. Whether or not these obscure cognitions be true, this attitude of mind is a response as it were to a half-heard, half imagined knocking at the outer doors of the personality; it is an enthusiastic readiness to adopt whatever in fact is the appropriate attitude to the real as a whole, but this should not be called otherworldliness, for it does not, like otherworldliness, despise and fear the world of everyday. It seeks only to know more of it and admire it more justly, and serve it more shrewdly.

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  You, looking back on my time with a certain aloofness, may smile when you learn that very many even of us are still enthralled so securely to the value of the experient ego, and so dismayed at the "injustice" of its fate on earth, that they cling to the belief in its immortality, claiming that if souls die the universe must be evil. And though even in your day you may not be entirely free from the primitive wish that your beloveds might live for ever you must I think see with a clearness impossible to us that such cravings are foolish, if not immoral. For even I, blindly groping toward that wider view of existence which I trust you have attained, begin to understand that the experient soul, though indeed it is a great intrinsic good, is also but a tone in a more excellent music, which would be marred were its individual sounds not to follow one another into silence.

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  But these moments perhaps lie.

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  Each of these two peoples, let us admit, is the custodian of a very important truth, or rather half-truth; but neither is at present capable of appreciating the equally important half-truth of the other.

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  At night we may sometimes raise our eyes to the stars, and imagine also, far beyond the limits of unaided vision, hosts of other stellar systems. Who knows what worlds, what intelligent races live out their lives around us in the depths of space! Whether they be few or many, we may, I think, be sure that they too, like us, must be concerned fundamentally with the spirit. Hail! Oh unseen, inaccessible, unimaginable comrades! But beyond those flashing suns, those distant galaxies, what is there? There, or rather no-where and no-when, or everywhere and all-when, we are confronted by the unspeakable, the inconceivable, to which we have no clue at all; unless perhaps, after all, the one clue may be the spirit that so imperiously in our own hearts demands allegiance. Perhaps! But perhaps this too is no clue at all to ultimate truth about the universe. Well, what matter? The spirit itself alone, whatever its cosmical status, gives meaning to our lives.

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• The superman genealogy is now complete at both ends. “The Splendid Race” (1908, his earliest surviving essay) shows the Oxford undergraduate a literal, eugenic superhumanist — “in time there will arise a splendid race of men, far wiser than we can hope to be, and far greater hearted” — a position the 1934 lecture disavows as worship (supermen are not to be adored as masters), though not, the record shows, as technique (§3.11); and “The Story of John,” the rejected eleven-page Last Men in London chapter, is the missing link between that youthful wish and Odd John (1935), whose colony already chooses group-suicide over capture, but does not yet die worshipping — the salute is what the novel added after the lecture.
  rare pieces (1908–49) ↗ · ¶ 46 — quoted passage in context

  As yet we are very far from this. But, having stumbled for a long time in the valleys, at last we have arrived at an eminence from which the right way can be seen leading upwards into the mists. It may be that after much labour and many catastrophes in time there will arise a splendid race of men, far wiser than we can hope to be, and far greater hearted.

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• The other lecture files show the platform version of all this persisting to the end: the 1947 “Science and Fiction” notes declare his fiction’s purpose in so many words — “to write modern myths… symbols of man-in-θ-cosmos, to relate science to religion, potentialities of man as vessel of θ spirit” (and, of Star Maker, the disarming margin note answering the objection that it has no love-interest: “but the focus is God + man”). The 1945 “Atomic Power” notes even predict that once power becomes cheap and trivial “we may turn again to θ Spirit.” And the platform’s persistence had a documented cost, in his own late accounting. In 1948, with the freshly rejected A Man Divided set aside (“Stapledon decided he had ‘quite lost interest’” — Crossley calls the novel “his last effort as a writer of fiction”), he answered Marcus’s question about his next project: “Agnes and I always busy rushing from meeting to meeting. I have got into a bad habit of giving innumerable talks to local and other societies, frittering away far too much time.” The speaking life that carried the salute to the end was, by his own admission, eating the writing life that had built it.
  Crossley, Speaking for the Future (1994) ↗ · ¶ 1355 — quoted passage in context

  IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1948, Stapledon struggled to finish a novel begun in 1946. When Fredric Warburg promptly rejected it, Stapledon decided he had “quite lost interest” in *A Man Divided*. Not finally published until 1950, *A Man Divided* was his last effort as a writer of fiction. When Aage Marcus asked him late in 1948 what his new project was, he admitted, “Agnes and I always busy rushing from meeting to meeting. I have got into a bad habit of giving innumerable talks to local and other societies, frittering away far too much time.”[1] The defining event of 1948 for Olaf, one that thrust him into a political rather than a literary spotlight for the rest of his life, had come in August when he accepted an invitation to a “World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace” in Poland.

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3.10 Last words: Brighton 1949 and The Opening of the Eyes (1954)

The last known platform statement of the salute sits in the archive beside the Humanism notes, in a lecture file we read only late in this project: “Personality and the Paranormal” (Progressive League, Brighton, February 1949). Its first sheet states the whole religion in two lines, each with its margin label: an attitude to “something worth while (spirit)” — margin: moral championship — and an attitude to “θ Whole, or superhuman” — margin: “agnostic piety.” A later sheet returns, at last, to the question the 1934 margin had posed and answered with a cancelled-then-restored “To worship” (“Instrumental to — what?”): now the answer runs “instrumentality — for what? God? Whole? for spirit itself” — and the same keyed block closes on a hedge: after the intervening claim that “ultimately — subjectivity fulfils objectivity” through awareness, espousal and creative action, comes “but this may be sheer myth / symbolically true.” The hedge’s nearest grammatical antecedent is the claim it follows, and whether it also disowns “for spirit itself” the sheet does not decide; what is certain is structural — answer and reservation travel as one keyed insertion, the bracket’s position established in the Brighton dossier. Even the late resolution keeps the 1934 discipline: assert, then reserve. Another sheet derives “the supreme religious experience” from “a salutory tension” (he first wrote “salutory emotional tension,” then struck the narrowing word) between “the extreme worthwhileness of personality” and the “sense of persons as ephemeral” — the two lights, as a psychology. And the notes end with the salute written out as a prayer, Job’s cry expanded to cosmic scale with the agnosticism doubled (the phrases “knowing not —,” “whether thou art,” and “or not” are diagonal margin insertions, woven here in reading order; if the diagonal stratum is later than the main lines — such marginalia in this archive are characteristically afterthoughts, though nothing dates these — the genealogy’s final step was taken in revision, in the margin of the lecture file itself: the dossier weighs the inference):

“Thy will be done.” “Though thou slay me, yet will I love thee.” Though thou slay mankind, — though thou slay thy cosmos, — knowing not — yet will I love thee, — whether thou art, knowing not what thou art, — or not, but feeling thee, in me, in others, in θ cosmos.

Fourteen years after telling the South Place audience “I salute though it destroy me,” he was still saying it — now to a universe he would not even affirm to exist. (The same notes contain his last word on the survival question the spiritualists pressed on him: “the desire for survival is at bottom irreligious… must be outgrown (even if survival is true)” — and the wry warning that proof of an afterlife would be spiritually dangerous, “bad otherworldliness… belief in survival makes true salvation harder.”) The biography fills in the occasion and adds a second witness to the platform position. The symposium was the Progressive League’s, “culminating in a national symposium at Brighton in February 1949—the first large-scale conference on the topic in England in twenty-five years,” and Stapledon’s role was the closer’s: “Olaf was asked to be commentator, making the final summation of the conflicting views that had been advanced by the leading British researchers.” And a contemporary published report (Plan, April 1949, cited by Crossley) preserves the summation’s core in indirect speech that matches the notes exactly: “We should not derive our values from the ideas of survival or of a divine personality. The values of love, wisdom, and creative action did not depend on anything except ordinary experience.” The sheet’s doctrine — values independent of metaphysics, survival spiritually beside the point — thus has an independent contemporary corroboration from the same evening.

Beside that last word on survival, the same sheet’s margin supplies the tradition he took himself to be in — a rare literary citation in these late notes: ∴ this world is — “ð Vale of Soul-Making” (Keats). The phrase is from Keats’s journal-letter of spring 1819 (the section of 21 April, now held), and the actual passage fits the Brighton argument more closely than a borrowed tag usually does. Keats coins it against exactly the doctrine Stapledon’s margin is calling “bad otherworldliness”: the world’s “common cognomen… among the misguided and superstitious” is a “vale of tears” — “from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitary interposition of God and taken to Heaven — What a little circumscribe[d] straightened notion!” (spelling the edition’s throughout). The counter-name follows in the same breath — “Call the world if you Please” the “vale of Soul-making” — “Then you will find out the use of the world” — and Keats rates his alternative, in terms Stapledon could have read from the platform, “a grander system of salvation” than the Christian religion: “or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation.” The system itself is worldly discipline: intelligences become souls only through “a World of Pains and troubles” — “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!” — which is the Brighton sheet’s own derivation of “the supreme religious experience” from a “salutory tension,” in Romantic dress. Even the hedges rhyme: Keats grants the soul’s immortality only hypothetically, “admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought,” and Stapledon’s bracket — “(even if survival is true)” — holds the same door open without walking through it. The margin cites a genuine ancestor, then: salvation re-imagined as soul-making rather than rescue, argued against the vale of tears. The difference is the one the whole lecture-shelf predicts — Keats’s school still has God for schoolmaster (“thus does God make individual beings, Souls… of the sparks of his own essence”), where the Brighton sheet leaves the office unfilled: “instrumentality — for what? God? Whole? for spirit itself… but this may be sheer myth.”

Where the argument finally came to rest is recorded in the book Stapledon was writing when he died in 1950, published posthumously as The Opening of the Eyes (1954). Earlier editions of this analysis read it through excerpts — Moskowitz’s quotations, plus one complete meditation via the Crossley Reader. The full 1954 text is now held (the owner’s scan, August 2026; ed. Agnes Z. Stapledon, Methuen), and the whole book changes the shape of the story this section used to tell, in one important respect set out below. First, what the excerpts showed is confirmed at its rawest. Meditation 32, “The Heavens declare — Nothing”, his last answer to Psalm 19, written from Caldy Hill — the hill of the 1913 star-letters and of Star Maker’s opening page: “On this moonless and star-brilliant night, I have come out on to the hill yearning to find you, if not in my heart, then in the heavens… The heavens declare nothing. The human lights of the town beneath me tell me nothing.” He then rehearses both modern cosmologies (big-bang finitude, continuous creation), concedes that they “are but a very little nearer to the truth than the East’s elephant and tortoise,” and keeps them anyway: “Yes, but for us today they have authority. Some such explosion of ever-receding galaxies… is now the background of all human life.” Thirty-six years after Latter-Day Psalms, the psalmist’s heavens have fallen silent — and the discipline of living under them without doctrine is intact. The dual awareness is still there, stripped of every consolation: “Is this perhaps hell’s most exquisite refinement, that one should be haunted by the ever-present ghost of a disbelieved-in God?” (the 1954 page reads “disbelieved-in God”; Moskowitz, quoting, drops the “in”). And the salute is still there, offered in full knowledge that it may salute nothing: “Without the fiction of your existence I am no more than a reflex animal, and the world is dust”; “Either I ride forward on the fiction of your existence, and attempt a deed more formidable” — or discard the illusion and slink back into the lair “of safety, but of desolation”… “Yet I choose to go forward.” In 1934 he claimed acquaintance: “I am aware of an unspeakable Beauty.” Here the object’s very existence is bracketed, and the salute rides on an acknowledged fiction.

But the full text corrects this section’s old structure: the fiction passages are not where the argument came to rest. The book is a sequence of fifty-four interlaced meditations addressed to a doubted “you,” and its method is an engineered oscillation — vision granted, tested, lost, restored, twice over, each cycle harsher. The doubt is present from the second meditation (“Saluting you, do I betray you? And is this my hell?”); the fictionalist crisis quoted above is meditations 16–17 — the floor of the first dark night, not quite a third of the way in — and the meditation that immediately follows is titled “Vision is Restored”: “may I at least never again forget that the murk is of my own making, and that indeed, indeed I have seen you, that you are real.” The fiction posture recurs, but each recurrence tilts toward the phantom’s reality (“Ineffable fiction, you have become more real to me even than my humanity”; “Most real phantom! I dare not, I cannot, I will not, ever again turn from you”). Meditation 32’s silent heavens sit at the book’s hinge — between the failed Christian consolation (24–31) and the failed humanist and Marxist consolations (33–39) — a silence between two rejected comforts, spoken while the addressed voice is withdrawn, not a freestanding last word; its immediate sequel still prays to the “adorable figment of all waking hearts.” The late identity-doubt of §3.9 is here too, structurally twice: the voice self-describing as “at once the passionate and holy Spirit, struggling against great odds for fulfilment within the universe; and yet also the ultimate and absolute Mystery,” and — the dread pole speaking in the first person — “If I am God at all I am also Satan… Whatever is terrible and whatever loathsome, that is I,” with the creature’s response the salute at its most abject: such minds, “Knowing that I shall destroy them, they must cringingly adore,” and the narrator “cannot but irrationally adore.” The salute itself runs through the book by name — a meditation titled “Salutation of the Dark-Bright”; “Those who have glimpsed you cannot but salute you, and strive to manifest you”; the double loyalty intact as “Yet, serving faithfully, I must still salute the vision” — and the book rules against abandoning man for the Other: the world-desertion meditations (46–47) end with the voice condemning withdrawal as spiritual lust. And the ending, with the whole book in view, is not resignation but commanded action: the last “fiction” indicted in the book is materialism, not deity (“You have no longer any excuse to cling to the fiction that you are nothing but a mechanism”); the voice urges that “With a sincere act of will you can, within limits, wrest the automaton from its course”; the narrator answers “since you affirm in my heart that I can do it, then surely I can. I must. I will.”; and the final meditation holds freedom and necessity as complementary half-truths down to the book’s last sentence — “It shall be so, if you grant me strength and skill to walk that knife edge.” Agnostic piety, kept to the deathbed, then — but as practice, not as collapse: worship without one particle of doctrine, the illumination itself corrected mid-book by the voice’s own discipline (“Through the quickening touch of my presence you found not union but worship” — worship, the 1934 word, preferred over mystical union). The practice held; the phenomenology oscillated beneath it by design. Two cautions temper the correction. The book was unfinished at his death, and nothing proves meditation 54 was designed as the end rather than where death stopped him. And the fictionalist reading is not wrong about the book’s method — every assertion, including the final one, is hedged, and the ending’s confidence is conditional (“if you grant me…”). What the full text removes is only, but importantly, the old implication that the fiction was the terminus.

Two details of the book’s afterlife belong to this project’s story. First: the manuscript was edited for publication by Agnes Stapledon — per Moskowitz, from working notes “with their many difficult-to-decipher abbreviations.” The biography adjusts the picture without overturning it: Stapledon had begun finalizing the book himself — “in the first week of September he began making a fair copy of the entire manuscript—his usual procedure before sending a new book to his typist” — though he “had not found a conclusion”; he died on 6 September, so how far the fair copy had advanced no source says. Beyond that, the documented pieces are these, and they should be kept separate: Crossley attests a notebook stage in passing (“In one of the notebooks for The Opening of the Eyes”) and calls the published book incomplete (“The lack of a satisfactory resolution to this incomplete book may have been inevitable no matter how long the author lived”); the 1954 edition itself records her role on its title page (“edited by Agnes Z. Stapledon”) and, in the Acknowledgement quoted below, the deciphering she shared with the typist; and Crossley records the naming: the book was “titled by Agnes after his death The Opening of the Eyes.” (An earlier printing of this paragraph ran those attestations together into a single definite scene — a half-fair-copied pile of working papers from which she assembled the text — which is more definite than any one source states; see ERRATA.md.) The abbreviation-deciphering scene rests on Moskowitz alone (Crossley neither corroborates nor contradicts it), so the kinship this project has claimed with her — the first person to do to Stapledon’s private notation what we attempted with the lecture notes — should be stated with that source visible; what is documented either way is her posthumous editing, the deciphering she shared with the typist, and the title she supplied — the precise process by which the published text was put together from what he left, no source records. Second: when his old editor E. V. Rieu eulogized that Olaf had died serene because “comprehension had been added to acceptance,” Agnes later corrected him, in remarks printed by Moskowitz, in words that could stand as the epigraph to the 1934 lecture: “I believe, rather, that he came to terms with reality by preparing himself to… accept the reality unquestioningly whatever it might turn out to be… his ‘acceptance’ was open-minded — therefore serene and at peace.” Not comprehension — open-minded acceptance. She understood precisely what he had spent forty years refusing to claim. The 1954 front matter, now held, fills in her workshop. The dedication is to the readers (“It is offered also to YOU, to whom his last words speak in your own language”), and the Acknowledgement thanks the unnamed friends “who read and discussed the early sections of this book with Olaf while he was writing it” — so the meditations circulated in draft, and were not a purely private deathbed text — along with the typist Ruth Backhouse, who “spent hours with me poring over the difficult places in the manuscript” (a second decipherer at the table), and Rieu himself “for his long interest in the evolving of the book.” What survives of Rieu’s preface in the scan adds one framing note in season: of the two cosmic novels he records that Stapledon “himself, perhaps more wisely, called them myths.”

One more late document belongs at the end of this genealogy, because it shows the lecture’s title subject still on the workbench when he died. Crossley records that “In a chapter written sometime in his last two years and designed for an unwritten book on humanism, he imagined the finale of London”: “The London streets will not always be crowded. Sooner or later the tide of human life will recede from them… And even if man escapes to other worlds, to other stars, he will not escape the ultimate freezing out of all life in the cosmos. This, not individual death but universal death, is for the awakened mind the probability to be reckoned with.” Sixteen years after telling South Place that humanism is not enough, and four after asking Conway Hall whether it is, he was still drafting a book on humanism — and the surviving chapter does what the lecture’s second half did: it sets the human street under the astronomical night. The book was never written. The question the 1934 title posed outlived every answer he drafted for it.

3.11 Hierarchy, eugenics, empire: the salute’s political shadow

One thread in this genealogy has to be stated plainly, because the documents quote around it more comfortably than the record warrants. Stapledon entered print, in 1908, as a legislative eugenicist: “The Splendid Race” proposes that marriages into “a family tainted with disease or moral weakness… should be regarded as a kind of incest,” to be “prevented by public opinion, which should be aided by legislation,” with celibacy for “undesirables” framed as “self-denial for the good of the community.” The essay’s hero is named in its opening line — “COLUMBUS FOUND A NEW WORLD; but Francis Galton found a new humanity” — and Crossley’s endnote catalogues the piece plainly as “an encomium on Francis Galton’s proposals for the ‘Improvement of the Human Breed’”; with Galton’s own books now held (August 2026, the monograph shelf), the undergraduate’s position can be measured against his hero’s: the family-records, pride-of-birth and differential-marriage programme the essay recaps is Galton’s, but the legislation clause is the twenty-year-old’s addition — Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883) proposes persuasion, honour and endowment, never statute. The biography deepens the provenance at both ends. The essay appeared in his school’s old-boys’ magazine (The Old Abbotsholmian, 1908), and Crossley’s longer quotation gives the argument its evangelical register: “But why is it sacrilegious to use direct means for the improvement of the human breed? We have been given wherewithal to climb a little nearer to divinity. Are we to stand mesmerised within the chalk circle of convention?” And the title itself has a traceable source: Abbotsholme’s school anthem, “The Love of Comrades” — “distilled from Whitman’s poem of the same name and laced with a jigger of British imperialism” — which the boy sang in the lines “We will make the Continents inseparable; We will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon.” The “splendid race” was learned as an anthem before it was proposed as a program. And the school supplied the other vocabulary in the same yard: the headmaster Cecil Reddie’s bathing poster ranked “the intimate contact of the human body with water” as “worship of Nature” — worship of the nonhuman was Abbotsholme idiom before it was Stapledon’s philosophy, taught alongside the anthem’s imperial race. Behind the school stands the colony. Crossley opens the life at Port Said: “From a childhood at the crossroads of the British economic empire, he took away images of a multi-ethnic world and of imperialist arrogance he never forgot” — a single root feeding both columns of this section’s ledger, the cosmopolitanism (Odd John’s international colony “is explicitly linked to Port Said, ‘the most cosmopolitan spot in all the world’”) and the anti-imperial politics documented below. The same years supply the imperial baseline he later outgrew — his 1913 self-educator articles held that “No parental care on the part of a conquering nation will turn Bushmen into Britons,” a sentence Crossley prints as the racial view the mature man discarded — and the biography’s summary of the trajectory matches the corpus’s: he “long remained curious about eugenics (at least until the revelations of Nazi experiments several decades later).” The 1929 thesis carries the ranking impulse into philosophy — everyone fulfilled “not merely… up to the limit of his capacity, but of the very highest capacity,” the man who achieves less “a cripple, an unfortunate, and a scourge to society” — and the lecture’s own preferred fourth world, “a hierarchical world where many subordinates fulfil their powers and a few attain the heights,” is that impulse’s 1934 form: softened by the mechanization mitigation, fenced by the consent margin, but still a ranked world, and not an innocent thought-experiment in the year of the Nuremberg rallies. Nor is that judgment anachronistic: the charge was made to his face, and the biography preserves it. When Odd John staged the great-man politics (months after South Place — §3.9), Haldane, “one friendly reader of the novel” in Crossley’s words, granted the evolutionary sport as “perfectly possible” science and then rejected the ideology outright: a better society comes “by developing the internal contradictions latent in the existing state, and not by the godlike activity of great men (the fascist theory). . . . It seems to me that your attitude is the kind which leads people to fascism.” The exchange was symmetrical: Haldane’s own future-myth (“The Last Judgment,” now held — §4) breeds a Venusian race-organism with pity edited out of the species as “an unpleasant feeling aroused by the suffering of other individuals” — the collectivist terminus sheets 20 and 25 refuse as firmly as Haldane refused the great man. And the technique outlived the worship. The 1931 broadcast “The Remaking of Man” hopes “that the creation of such a race will become in time the constant policy of all mankind”; the 1945 atomic-power essay would “turn all workers into aristocrats,” with “the universal slave, atomic power” doing what servants did; Youth and Tomorrow (1946) keeps improvement “by eugenical or biochemical methods” on the far-future agenda; Interplanetary Man? (1948) contemplates that “given sufficient biological knowledge and eugenical technique, it might be possible to breed new human types of men to people the planets.” In the 1948 discussion the civilizing mission’s grammar surfaces in his own courteous idiom: “we should try to educate other races — as long as we were sure we were educating them up and not down to our level.” What the 1934 lecture disavows, then, is the worship of supermen — the master-race deity — not the ambition to remake human stock; the two run side by side to the end. Even the doctrineless wartime pamphlet keeps the ranked idiom without the breeding program: Beyond the “Isms” (1942) has “superiors in the vast hierarchy of the spirit,” rates the capacity for the higher activities as belonging to “all of us who are above the moron level,” and defines humanity as “being incipiently superhuman” — no eugenics proposals anywhere in it, but the ranking impulse audible in a book about the spirit. They also run beside their own correctives, in the same books and the same years: sheet 11’s “none may sacrifice another against his will”; the anti-herd and anti-Race-deity arguments of sheets 20 and 25; the 1936 Peace Letter’s concrete anti-imperial program — the fourth and final draft, dispatched to thirty newspapers that September, called on Britain to “surrender for the good of humanity any privileges, imperial or economic” acquired through exploitation and to grant its colonies “self-government speedily and without restriction” (and when a correspondent could not imagine what privileges Englishmen enjoyed at others’ expense, Stapledon wondered whether he thought “the British Empire is a purely philanthropic institution”); the wartime platform’s explicit disavowal of biological nationalism — in a 1941 lecture to a military audience, “Is There an English Spirit?”, “he denied that the ‘biological Englishman’ had any more reality than Hitler’s Aryan,” and the litany he built for the companion article (“most of which was cut from the printed version”) holds pride and shame in one sentence: “One may reasonably be proud of being English, so long as one is also ashamed. I am proud to be the fellow-countryman of Shakespeare and Newton; ashamed of the slave-traders, the industrial exploiters, the imperial adventurers… ashamed of the Black and Tans, of the Amritsar Massacre, of the treatment of the unemployed”; and Star Maker’s 1937 epilogue registering both the colonial fact (“where Dutch and English profit by the Negro millions, those hosts were stirred by vague dreams of freedom”) and its mechanism (“mastered… through priority in the use of guns, and the arrogance that guns breed”). The biography adds the pre-history of those published epilogue sentences: they are the flattened residue of a sharper manuscript. The draft’s final panorama had ended its African survey “Far to the south, where Dutch and English thrive on the negro millions, I heard it whispered, ‘The Blacks are waking.’” — an image of Abyssinian resistance spreading across a waking continent — and “In the text as published,” Crossley writes, “everything in this splendid passage is flattened into three cautious sentences”; his explanation is Stapledon’s own topicality worry (“Remembering how quickly the topical first forty pages of Last and First Men had dated, Stapledon blunted a sharp image of a new Africa”), with the surrounding political passages toned down in a run of revisions he connects to Myers’s editorial advice. (One caution on Crossley’s account, which the held novel can check: his list of passages “deleted from the manuscript at Myers’s urging” includes the young men “ranked together in their thousands, exalted, possessed, saluting the flood-lit Führer” — but that sentence stands in the published epilogue nearly verbatim, “in thousands” for “in their thousands” (§3.6 quotes it), so “deleted” there means at most reworked; the Africa case, where his word is “flattened,” is the one his evidence fully supports.) The corpus indicts empire and herd-worship while keeping breeding and hierarchy on the table — a progressive package of its period, held with unusual self-awareness and no more than usual self-suspicion. A reader of the lecture should know both halves.

4. Intellectual context: what he was arguing with

• The South Place Ethical Society itself: organized Humanism, the tradition of Conway and Coit. The lecture’s very title is a provocation formed for this audience. The tradition’s church wing now sits on the shelf: Stanton Coit’s National Idealism and a State Church (1907; now held) keeps the whole apparatus of religion while replacing its object — “we shall retain the word God and all the rest of the nomenclature of religion,” for “God must henceforth be identical with the Spirit of Man within nature” — and taunts the movement’s rationalist wing that freethought has stalled for want of “a cultus, a fraternity, with assemblings and holy days.” Sheets 2–3’s humanism — all worship due to the awakening spirit of man — states that position as its holders stated it; and the title’s “superhumanism” reclaims a word Coit’s book had already used for the enemy: the sentiment that keeps “a preference for the superhuman, which casts discredit upon and paralyses the efficiency of the human.” What the book cannot show is the 1934 room’s own creed — Coit’s national-church program claimed, by his own count, “scarcely any adherents” — so this documents the tradition the title provokes, not a poll of the audience; the ethical movement’s internal war over whether ethics is a religion (church wing against rationalist wing) meant “humanism is not enough” landed differently on the room’s two factions. That war is no longer a characterization but a documented institution, for the movement’s own history of itself — Gustav Spiller’s The Ethical Movement in Great Britain (printed for the author, 1934; now held), compiled from minute-books and Annual Reports by the Union’s veteran organiser and published in the lecture’s own year — sits on the shelf beside Coit. Its opening battle was fought at South Place: Coit’s ministry there (begun September 1888) ended when the Society negatived his ex-officio motion — “Thereupon Dr. Coit unconditionally resigned,” effective January 1892 — and his admirers, “eager to found a new spiritual home,” built the body that voted in 1914 to become the Ethical Church (the proposal on the table had been “The Church of the Empire”), with intoned creed, robed choir, a marble “Altar to the Ideal,” and the held National Idealism volumes named as the basis of its service-book’s basis; the rationalist pole had declared from the founding decade, “It does not propose, as has been thought, to found a new religious worship.” And Spiller preserves the sharpest document of all: the September 1887 discourses that won Coit the South Place ministry preached, from that platform, both doctrines the 1934 lecture came to answer — the Christian’s loving God, seen in the strongest moral light, “is in outline the perfect human character projected outward”; and “supplication to a superhuman being” is “so palpably false and degrading that it should be silenced.” In the movement’s whole documentary history the word “superhuman” appears only in hostile contexts — the sermon’s, and a petition against moral teaching that makes “appeal to supernatural or superhuman motives” — so the lecture’s title reclaimed the movement’s own enemy-word, on the same platform, forty-seven years after the house sermon had damned it; and sheet 12’s psycho-analytic solvent, conceded and then answered, was not news to this room but its own founding gospel restated.
  Coit, National Idealism (1907) ↗ · ¶ 1151 · ¶ 640 · ¶ 365 · ¶ 117 · ¶ 147 — quoted passages in context

  perience we shall retain the word God and all the rest of the nomenclature of religion, to denote the factors in our present experience which perform the same functions designated under the supernaturalistic terminology.

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  The current form of trust in invisible agents involves, besides the belief in Christ's conscious activity after his death, a form which in general has not been recognised as spiritism. For spiritism has always seemed to imply the belief in very many spirits, and Christian theologians have seemed to assume that if you cease to believe in spiritual pluralism, and recognise only one spirit, you have ceased to be a spiritist. But surely in the belief that there is an infinite, all-wise, omnipresent Creator, who exists and continues to operate, who every instant sustains by his will that which he first brought into being, we have spiritism par excellence. If the churches are to turn from trust in invisible agencies outside of society and to look for redemption only from within its own resources, they can no longer introduce the idea of a supernatural deity. God must henceforth be identical with the Spirit of Man within nature. The Creator of the universe, although he be a self-conscious personality, is not a member of human society. As in the case of every man after his death, so is it true of the Creator of the universe : there is no occasion whatever for denying his existence or doubting it, but the very moral sanity of society is at stake to insist that he is not a subject or object of rights or duties. A revising barrister would be legally and morally obliged to strike off his name, had it been entered, from any list of electors. Though he came

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  If anyone wishes to know why humanitarian freethought has scarcely made any progress in two thousand years as an organising, nation-building force, let him not imagine that it is because it is inherently negative, disruptive, or destructive. Let him be well assured that it is because Freethinkers have in the past never realised the supreme importance of concreting their humanitarian idealism into a cultus, into a fraternity, with assemblings and holy days ; while on the other hand the champions of supernaturalistic religion have fully appreciated the necessity for such devices. In the past, rationalistic idealism has always been individualistic and non-aesthetic. It has always undervalued the debt which original minds owe to the common mind about them. It has always depreciated the artistic, poetic, and symbolic way of communicating ideas. It has always over-estimated the independent resources of the individual — especially of his reasoning powers. We have no evidence of the failure of a rationalistic idealism which was at the same time socialistic in spirit and symbolical in its methods of presentation. Accordingly we are justified in thinking that psychological socialism and ritualistic methods of propaganda would prove as powerful in the spread of naturalism as they have been in the perpetuation of supernaturalism. We have, therefore, reason to believe that whoever prepares a book of common humanitarian devotion, adequate for a scientific and democratic age, will do for the spread of humanistic religion such a service as Marconi or Edison or Lister or Pasteur has done for trade, commerce, and medical and sanitary art. Until the new idealism possesses its own manual of religious ritual, it cannot communicate effectively its

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  Although those who dislike the conscious efforts of ecclesiastical institutions as somehow incompatible with true spirituality may not be aware of it themselves, this sentiment of theirs is essentially opposed to a belief in the spiritual organism of society as the source of r^ demptive energy. They maintain that a revival is more *- genuine and more holy if it come quite spontaneously. But why should man's purposes and man's reason and man's foresight have a polluting effect ? Are not consciousness and self-consciousness the highest manifestations of humanity and the chief blessings which society works in its individual members ? Why, again, is an event in the individual soul produced by occult and mysterious forces or by unembodied spirits any more beautiful or beneficent than one produced by human purpose and foresight ? Such a sentiment can only arise in a preference for the superhuman, which casts discredit upon and paralyses the efficiency of the human. Why is the conscious less to be treasured than the sub-conscious ? Why is effort less holy than spontaneity .'' If it be not less holy, why is a revival systematically planned and controlled less sacred and beneficent than an unpremeditated outburst .'' Those who discourage the effort of others in bringing about a man's conversion cast a slur upon conscious human effort altogether.

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  There is, however, another view as to what the real ultimate organic unit in religion is. It is a view that as yet can claim scarcely any adherents, whether among Free Churchmen, Anglicans, Romanists, Agnostics, Rationalists, or persons generally indifferent to the religious principles advocated by Christian organisations. This view is that the real organic unit of religious life, of which any man is a member, is always the nation to which he belongs, in so far as the nation stands for social and personal ideals and principles. This view makes the Church the unit of religious life ; but it identifies the Church with each nation as a society believing in and applying certain standards of civilisation and culture, of duty and responsibility, of right and liberty.

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  Spiller, Ethical Movement (1934) ↗ · ¶ 484 · ¶ 938 · ¶ 1553 · ¶ 1675 · ¶ 1648 · ¶ 146 · ¶ 372 · ¶ 376 · ¶ 2830 — quoted passages in context

  The year following (1891/92) the Society passed through a grave crisis. Dr. Stanton Coit informed the Society that he could only remain its Minister if five proposals, which he specified, were accepted in substance. After discussion, followed by divisions protracted through two General Members’ meetings, his proposals were substantially accepted. One of these conditions, however, required ratification by a two-thirds majority in a meeting convened specially for the purpose. This meeting was duly held on 15th December 1891, but negatived the motion “ That it is desirable that Dr. Coit be ex-officio a member of all committees in this Society.” Thereupon Dr. Coit unconditionally resigned, his resignation to take effect ist January 1892.

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  In December 1891, as we learnt in Chapter II., Dr. Stanton Coit resigned his pastorate of the South Place Ethical Society. Not a few of those who had been among his admiring listeners at South Place Chapel, were consequendy eager to found a new spiritual home where

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  The final meeting concluded with carrying by 26 votes against i, the following consequential motion : “ That in Rule i of the Society the words the West London Ethical Society be replaced by Ethical Church.” Thus the West London Ethical Society became the Ethical Church, the original proposal having been that it should be called The Church of the Empire.

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  When we enter the semi-circular church, we note immediately in front of us an oak-panelled wall. The panelling reaches the height of the balustrade of the first gallery, the part of the wall behind the centrally placed pulpit being draped with a richly embroidered curtain. Above the panelling, or rather as part of it, is, in the centre, a framed tempera picture by Walter Crane, with the legend on the frame : “ Still the race of Hero Spirits pass the torch from hand to hand ”, words adapted from Charles Kingsley. (The pulpit, too, was designed by Walter Crane. “ His was also the general colour scheme of the interior of the Church, including the blue carpet in front of the pulpit and the gold-starred blue ceiling.”) Above this picture is a beautiful bust of Pallas Athene. The lower, central part of the panelling is replaced by a large pulpit, on the upper part of which we read the line from Wordsworth : ” Thanks to the human heart by which we live ”. On the right side of the pulpit, placed against the panelled wall, is a statue of Jesus the Christ and on the left one of Gautama the Buddha, each with appropriate quotations. To the left and right of Walter Crane’s picture, on the bare wall, is a caste relief by Lucca della Robbia. On the two extreme limits of the gallery in front, touching the panelled wall, are the busts of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius. (Thus West and East and Greece and Rome arc represented.) In the centre of the semi-circular space between the pulpit and the gallery stands, on a heavy blue carpet covering the whole floor space between the pulpit and the pews, a modern Skyess marble altar, with the following inscription for its four sides: An Altar to the Ideal / The True I The Beautiful f The Good, (This altar, designed by Mr. Vernon Hill, was provided during the year 1923/24.) There is much else of beauty to be noted in the Church, but here can only be mentioned a series of three stained glass windows, with Joan of Arc in the centre and Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale to the right and left of her, and, in a corner of the Church, a modern shrine containing an ancient porcelain statue of Kwan-Yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion, who, the legend says, refused to enter heaven so long as any one was denied admission.

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  But this basis of the Services at the Ethical Church has in turn a basis. In 1907 and 1908 respectively. Dr. Stanton Coit published National Idealism and a State Church and National Idealism and the Boo\ of Common Prayer, two portly volumes. Here he incisively, cogendy, and brilliantly argues both in favour of an ethical ritual and of ethical churches and of the reinterpretation of the ritual of the orthodox churches on humanistic and non-supernaturalistic lines. Only a lengthy summary could even faintly do justice to these closely reasoned volumes. Accordingly, the reader is referred to the two works the aim of which may be

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  “ From this account of the aims and methods of the Society, it will be obvious that it does not propose to enter into competition with existing religious organisations. It does not propose, as has been thought, to found a new religious worship. It merely aims at disentangling what is distinctively moral from the more transient forms of doctrine and ritual in which it is embedded. At a time when these forms arc being subjected on all hands to a critical and destructive analysis, it is felt that such a disentanglement is of supreme importance and is specially incumbent upon those who have the moral education of young people entrusted to them.

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  '* Ethical Culture, as a religion for the people, offers in the place of God’s vigilance an adequate increase of men’s vigilance, in the place of a presence believed in, a presence actually seen and felt and heard — men and women looking and hearing, preventing, warning, condemning, rescuing. The dread of being caught hy one’s fellow-men offers, I believe, the strongest check that can be found to one’s evil impulses. The possibility of incurring the contempt even of strangers, holds us back from our sweetest transgressions; and the thought of the merest chance of being found out by those who respect us and love us tenderly, cuts into the soul like a knife, it spreads sharp pain through the finest pleasure, so that we recoil from our fondest schemes.” (p. 152.) — “ Next to the fear of being caught in evil-doing, the motive most powerful foi good over the minds of ordinary men, and especially of the poor and illiterate, is the desire for personal approbation when they have done well, and the fear of offending and disappointing someone who cares for them. This longing for personal fellowship in the inner moral life is, I believe, the deepest need of the human heart.” (p. 153.)—” Friends, if you hold up the Christian’s ideal of a loving God in the strongest light of your moral insight, you will see that it is in outline the perfect human character projected outward, that it is a vision which the human soul throws out from its own depths upon the clear blue sky of inward meditation. No sadder error has ever been committed than to mistake it for a reality and rest in the sight of it. We must make it a reality, else it has no existence. . . . But because we do not mistake it for a real existence, but regard it as a thing to be made real in our lives and in society, we maintain that ethical culture in this respect is better fitted than theistic religion to bring religion to the people.” (p. 157.)—” It is one thing to say as atheistic ethics docs ; ‘ There is no personal G^, therefore let us take up with the next best thing, and love our fellow-men’; and quite another — as different as day from night — to say:

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  which awakens contemplation, we set before men the vision of a glorified earth. Stung by its splendours, men will leap to create it. It was always the glorified earth that the heart of man longed for. It was only as the hopes of our realising it faded away that the vision of another world began to shed its strange unnatural light over this earthly existence.” (pp. 167-168!;— ” Ethical Culture is a religion for the illiterate, because it intends and hopes to do away with illiteracy altogether; it sees that illiteracy ought not to be; furthermore, it is demonstrating that it need not be.” (p. 169.)— ‘‘The doctrine that our Moral impulses do not well up out of our own nature, but arc injected upon supplication to a superhuman being for help, is so palpably false and degrading that it should be silenced. . . . The power to do right is a part of ourselves. It is as much a part of ourselves at least as the power to think, to see or to eat, and there is no more need to ask some superhuman being for it than for these. There is only need of exercising it, no matter how weak it may be.” (p. 170.) — ‘‘What, then, have we to offer? To the neglected, a friend; to those in moral danger, a guard; to the weak, encouragement; to the erring, self-respect; to the ignorant, knowledge; and unto the sorrowing, an inward joy.” (p. 171.) — (Last paragraph.) ‘‘The light which streams from conscience bathes in opal beauty every individual life; it penetrates and makes radiant with the splendour of pure joy every family on earth; the city where it gleams has no need of the sun, neither oi the moon; blessed too are the nations that walk in the light of it. The warmth of its beams reaches to the uttermost limits of mankind; yea, it floods the universe with its effulgence inexhaustible. We behold a glory in the sea and sky, and on the distant mountains, which is not their own. We lose ourselves in light. Such is the poetry of the moral life. Such is the gospel of ethics.” (p. 174.)

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  “ The statement having been frequently made at public meetings and circulated in the daily Press that all the parents of Board School children are satisfied with the religious teaching now given in the Board Schools of London, we, the undersigned, parents of such children, in order to prove to the Board the falsity of that statement, and to help towards the introduction of moral teaching which shall make no appeal to supernatural or superhuman motives, do hereby protest that in general such motives are not suitable to the understanding and character of children, and are particularly out of place when taught in State Schools, which are maintained at the cost of citizens of every creed and of no creed.

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• Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917; English trans. 1923; now held): “the numinous,” “Mysterium Tremendum” — the terms appear on sheets 23–24 (Otto is not named in the notes; the identification is ours, and the held text bears it out well beyond the two loanwords — the full test, including the one channel caveat via Julian Huxley’s excerpts, is at §2.6(b)). The sheets carry Otto’s phenomenology whole — both poles of it, the objectivity claim, even the evoke-don’t-define method — whether taken from the book itself or through its wide second-hand circulation (§2.6(b) weighs the channels) — while refusing the “schematization” by which Otto turns the numinous back into the personal God of Christian doctrine: the very inference sheet 28 forbids.
• Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity (1920; both volumes now held — the deity argument itself since August 2026) — the era’s dominant British realist metaphysics, and the professional-philosophy position nearest to “superhumanism.” Stapledon’s debt is his own footnote: A Modern Theory of Ethics credits its emergence machinery to a school headed by this book’s author (“All my ideas on this subject are obviously derived from the works of Prof. Alexander…”), and Philosophy and Living names the doctrine — the universe’s “nisus toward deity,” space-time as the fundamental reality “which generates the manifold characters of the universe.” Vol. I gives the program — Alexander’s God is reached at the end of “the order of realities” (“in philosophy there is no short road to deity”), as the next quality to grow within the one Space-Time whose empirical ladder already produced life and mind, with worship honoured as a datum the metaphysics must square with (“consistently with… the sentiment of worship which is directed to God”) — and its one anticipatory image is the genial methodological “angel” who contemplates us as we contemplate trees, with the honest aside that the angel’s “vision” is “higher than mental and different from it.” Vol. II (Books III–IV) delivers the doctrine, and earlier editions of this analysis could quote it only as received account; it is now on the table in Alexander’s own words. “Deity is the next higher empirical quality to the highest we know” — mind; the universe “is engaged in bringing to birth” that quality, is “pregnant” with it; “God is the whole world as possessing the quality of deity,” and as an actual existent “the infinite world with its nisus towards deity,” “big or in travail with deity”; but the possessor of deity is ideal only — “the world in its infinity tends towards infinite deity, or is pregnant with it, but that infinite deity does not exist”; “the infinite God is purely ideal or conceptual.” So the core of the contrast survives contact with the real deity chapters: Alexander’s deity is prospective and continuous — awaited, in the making, never actual — where the lecture’s Other is present, encountered, saluted. But the full text re-weights the contrast in two ways the Vol.-I round could not see. First, “genial” was Vol. I’s tone, not Vol. II’s: on each level the next quality “looms ahead, awfully”; even the theism Alexander corrects has its God “awfully removed from man”; and the unknowability is total — “Our human altars still are raised to the unknown God,” deity representable “only by analogy,” “fitly described in this analogical manner as the colour of the universe.” Alexander’s deity is, in the end, as unknowable as the lecture’s Other — the alienness that was an aside in Vol. I is Book IV doctrine — so the load-bearing difference is not dread versus cheer. Second, what does separate the two positions, now quotable from both sides, is reciprocity: for Alexander “The responsiveness of God to man is the most vital and distinctive feature in the religious sentiment”; “If man wants God and depends upon him, God wants man, and is so far dependent”; “Worship is co-operation”; deity “is in the line of goodness not of evil.” Alexander’s God needs us; Stapledon’s Other — Philosophy and Living’s “‘Other,’ rightly careless of man and his petty desires” — is precisely the God who does not, and the salute claims no co-operation, no favour, no return. On religion Vol. II proves kin and foil at once. Alexander’s definition is appetitive and anti-projectionist: God “is correlative to that emotion or sentiment, as food is correlative to appetite,” a “distinctive religious appetite, comparable to the appetite for food or drink, which though it does not make its object discovers it” — the same discovers-not-makes claim the lecture stakes on sheet 23’s “in objective existence,” against the Freudian solvent. A man may be “partially or wholly deity-blind, as he is tone-deaf” — the lecture’s capacity-spectrum (“those who already know will understand, others not”), in the school’s own idiom. But Alexander’s appetite has food, and his account of religious fear is developmental — “The fear of the thunderstorm is not the fear of God, though such fear may be the first channel by which the religious sentiment is provoked”; the “ingredient of fear or awe” belongs to religion’s primitive stages — where Otto keeps the tremendum constitutive at every stage, and sheet 23’s object carries “formidableness, horror” and “exquisiteness, sweetness” together to the end: on the psychology of worship Stapledon follows Otto, not the school he credits for the metaphysics. And the P&L slippage now has chapter and verse from the deity chapters themselves: Alexander insists “deity is not spirit, but something different from it in kind,” not “the perfection of manhood” but “something which transcends in kind the most transcendent manhood” — he even mocks the anthropocentric assumption with “a race of seaweeds” holding that mind, when it comes, “must be founded on the life of seaweeds.” So P&L’s “fully awakened cosmical consciousness” contradicts the letter of Book IV, not merely its received summary — though in fairness Alexander’s own figures hand a hasty reader the misreading ready-made: deity is the “mind” (his scare quotes) of the world’s “body,” and Book III’s watchword is “Time is the mind of Space and Space the body of Time.” The gloss reads Stapledon’s own eschatology (the awakened cosmos of Star Maker) back into Alexander — a small bend, but now measurable against the very sentences it bends. (Whitehead, the other name in the 1929 footnote, is now held — Process and Reality, Macmillan, October 1929; acquired August 2026 — and the counter-position is quotable rather than received. The consequent nature of his God is everything the lecture’s Other is not: “a tender care that nothing be lost”; “the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness”; “the great companion — the fellow-sufferer who understands”; the “brief Galilean vision of humility” against “the ruling Caesar.” Two things temper “exact counter-position,” now that the book can be read. Whitehead’s God is dipolar, and the primordial pole — its valuation “deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass” — stands nearer the Star Maker, who “neither loved nor had need of love,” than anything in Alexander. And the confrontation is documented on Stapledon’s side: Philosophy and Living’s Whitehead exposition quotes the fellow-sufferer sentence verbatim, then suspects the theory of God of being “determined less by logical necessity than by the desire to complete his system by relating it, in however strange a manner, with religious orthodoxy” — he read the tender God and declined him, exercising against Whitehead the very wishful-thinking discipline the lecture demands. The tiering: nothing documents contact with this book before 1939 — the 1929 footnote’s Whitehead citations are all Science and the Modern World — so the 1934 lecture cannot be read as answering it; what the held text fixes is the school’s map. Alexander’s God is not yet; Whitehead’s is with us and suffers with us; the lecture’s Other is with us and does not care.)
  A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929) ↗ · ¶ 94 — quoted passage in context

  84 A MODERN THEORY OF ETHICS But here let us distinguish between two very different possible kinds of genuine internally teleological activity. (x) Let us call the first kind ‘ direct ’ teleological activity, and define it as activity which, whether or not it violates physical laws, varies in varying circumstances in such manners that a certain state is either attained immediately or maintained all along. For instance, it is conceivable that organisms sometimes preserve their organization even when, by the operation of mere physical laws, they should disintegrate. (2) On the other hand, ‘indirect’ teleo- logical activity may be defined as activity which is capable, not merely of violating physical laws, but also of foregoing an immediate partial attainment of its own regulative end for the sake of a more complete attainment at a later stage. Conscious purposeful activity is obviously of this kind ; but we have no right to assume that consciousness is essential even in this case. It is not wholly inconceivable that this sort of unconscious teleology has contributed to biological evolution. These two possible kinds of activity are very different, and the former is far more intelligible than the latter. But for our purposes both may be included in the concept of internal teleology. Now there may be in the world no such activity. On the other hand many persons suspect very strongly that the activity of living organisms is partly of this kind. Some would account for it in terms of an ‘ entelechy ’ or vital principle interfering with the course of mechanical events. Others would say that at the level of organization which characterizes living things this new way of behaving “emerges ’. For my part I much prefer the latter view ; but this is not the place to discuss emergence.! Here I am only concerned to urge that activity of this kind, defined as teleological, does not necessarily involve any reference (direct or indirect) to consciousness, that it no more involves consciousness than the concept of physical mechanism does. We have become so familiar with the concept of physical mechanism (as Professor Whitehead 1 All my ideas on this subject are obviously derived from the works of Prof. Alexander, Prof. Lloyd Morgan, Prof. Whitehead, and Prof, Broad.

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  Philosophy and Living II (1939) ↗ · ¶ 595 · ¶ 712 · ¶ 628 · ¶ 631 — quoted passages in context

  Evolution is conceived as a cosmical process, tending, either by necessity or more often as an undecided free adventure, toward something like a " far-off divine event " in which the potentiality in the universe for consciousness will be fulfilled by a process continuous with biological evolution. For instance, in the philosophy of Samuel Alexander, the universe is said to have a " *nisus* toward deity," a tendency or urge or bias to achieve the fully awakened cosmical consciousness. In this view space and time, or rather space-time, is regarded as the fundamental reality, which generates the manifold characters of the universe. This is a very different conception from that of Absolute Idealism, in which reality is " above " space and time.

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  In general the ecstatic experience, which is the mystic's supreme reward, is said to give profound insight into the essential nature of reality, along with a stammering inability to describe *what* has been revealed, save in the most metaphorical and paradoxical terms. Sometimes the reality thus revealed is referred to in terms of dread, and even terror, as the divine and ruthless "Other," rightly careless of man and his petty desires. In some cultures, on the other hand, it is said to be the divine, personified Love, which embraces, or gathers up into itself, the spirit of the individual lover of this all-loving God. In other cultures it appears as the impersonal and wholly dispassionate universal spirit, or the underlying reality which constitutes the unity of all things. One point on which there is general agreement is that in the supreme experience time is in some sense transcended. What is discovered is a reality which is eternal.

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  ground or root but the flower of all existence. For "he shares with every new creation its actual world." Thus he has, after all, actuality. "Each temporal occasion embodies God"; and God is "a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation." Not only so, but God is one. For the fulfilment of God's "consequent nature" is a single consciousness, and "the realisation of the actual world in the unity of his nature." Between God and the world there is a reciprocal relation. Each is necessary to the other's being. By reason of this reciprocal relation, "the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands."

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  Apart from the general criticism that it is sometimes impossible to tell whether Whitehead is being very profound or very vague, we must note also that sometimes, for instance in his theory of God, the trend of his argument seems to be determined less by logical necessity than by the desire to complete his system by relating it, in however strange a manner, with religious orthodoxy.

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  Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity I (1920) ↗ · ¶ 125 · ¶ 222 · ¶ 181 · ¶ 183 — quoted passages in context

  THE title of this book names what is simplest in the universe, and what is, for us, most complex in it. A very large part of the book will be occupied with the mind ; but I shall endeavour to exhibit minds in the order of realities which begins with mere events in space and time and ends with God. No explanation is needed for leaving the notion of deity to the end. However immediately we may be aware of God in the religious sentiment, in philosophy there is no short road to deity. But I propose in this introductory chapter to explain the reasons why I begin with Space and Time and not with mind ; and by a preliminary and provisional description of the relation of mind to its objects, to show how an inquiry into this secondary topic leads on to the more fundamental one.

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  Finally, I shall discuss what can be known as to the nature of deity, consistently with the whole scheme of things which we know, and with the sentiment of worship which is directed to God. In attempting this enterprise I can but regret that I am hampered at many points by want of relevant knowledge, especially mathematical and physical knowledge, but it may well be that an outline which is defective in detail may be correct in its general movement. Whether this is so or not I must leave to the result to determine.

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  If I could make my mind an object as well as the tree, I could not regard my mind, which thus takes in its own acts and things in one view, as something which subsists somehow beside the tree. But since I cannot do so, since my mind minds itself in being aware of the tree, what is this but the fact that there is a mind, whose consciousness is self-consciousness, which is together with the tree? Imagine a being higher than me, something more than mind ; let us call him an angel. For him my consciousness would be an object equally with the tree, and he would see my enjoyment compresent with the tree, much in the same way as I may see a tree compresent with the earth. I should be for him an object of angelic contemplation, and he would have no doubt that different

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  as are the gifts of minds and trees they are co-ordinate in his contemplated world, as external things are in mine. Now I cannot do as an angel and contemplate myself, in so far as I am mind (for, of course, I contemplate my body). But in recognising that in the cognitive relation to the tree, the tree and I are distinct and relatively independent existences compresent with each other, I am, under the limitations imposed on me, anticipating the angel's 'vision' (I have to use mental terms for what is higher than mental and different from it). Hence I have sometimes allowed myself playfully to speak of what here I call seriously the empirical method in philosophy as the angelic method. What the angel sees as the compresence of two objects I experience as the compresence of an enjoyed mind and a contemplated non-mental object. And if you fail, as many persons appear to fail to whom I have spoken, to find in your experience the act of experiencing the enjoyment, but find only the object and nothing else ; for instance, if you find the tree but not the enjoyed perceiving of it ; the reason is that you are seeking for the enjoyed as if it were an object contemplated, and naturally can find no perceiving or imagining or thinking which stands to you in the same relation as the tree, no idea of reflection or inner sense comparable with an idea of sensation. All that you then find that can be called your self is your body. On the other hand, seek for the enjoyment as something which you mind or live through, and which you are, and, beginning with acts highest in the scale like willing or desiring, where the enjoyed act is palpable, descend in the scale through constructive imagination to remembering, perceiving, and at last to bare sensing of a sensum, where the enjoying act is least distinct,¹ you will assure yourself of the compresence of the non-mental object with your enjoyed mind.

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  Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity II (1920) ↗ · ¶ 1060 · ¶ 1061 · ¶ 1075 · ¶ 1112 · ¶ 1096 · ¶ 1063 · ¶ 1184 · ¶ 1171 · ¶ 1173 · ¶ 1212 · ¶ 1259 · ¶ 1047 · ¶ 1139 · ¶ 1149 · ¶ 1142 · ¶ 1064 · ¶ 1273 · ¶ 1082 · ¶ 203 — quoted passages in context

  Within the all-embracing stuff of Space-Time, the universe exhibits an emergence in Time of successive levels of finite existences, each with its characteristic empirical quality. The highest of these empirical qualities known to us is mind or consciousness. Deity is the next higher empirical quality to the highest we know ; and, as shall presently be observed, at any level of existence there is a next higher empirical quality which stands towards the lower quality as deity stands towards mind. Let us for the moment neglect this wider implication and confine our attention to ourselves. There is an empirical quality which is to succeed the distinctive empirical quality of our level ; and that new empirical quality is deity. If Time were as some have thought a mere form of sense or understanding under which the mind envisages things, this conception would be meaningless and impossible. But Time is an element in the stuff of which the universe and all its parts are made, and has no special relation to mind, which is but the last complexity of Time that is known to us in finite existence. Bare Time in our hypothesis, whose verification has been in progress through each stage of the two preceding Books and will […]

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  Deity is thus the next higher empirical quality to mind, which the universe is engaged in bringing to birth. That the universe is pregnant with such a quality we are speculatively assured. What that quality is we cannot know ; for we can neither enjoy nor still less contemplate it. Our human altars still are raised to the unknown God. If we could know what deity is, how it feels to be divine, we should first have to have become as gods. What we know of it is but its relation to the other empirical qualities which precede it in time. Its nature we cannot penetrate. We can represent it to ourselves only by analogy. It is fitly described in this analogical manner as the colour of the universe. For colour, we have seen, is a new quality which emerges in material things in attendance on motions of a certain sort. Deity in its turn is a quality which attends upon, or more strictly is equivalent to, previous or lower existences of the order of mind which itself rests on a still lower basis of qualities, and emerges when certain complexities and refinements of arrangement have been reached. Once more I am leaning for help upon Meredith, in whose *Hymn to Colour*, colour takes for a moment the place of what elsewhere he calls Earth : a soul of things which is their last perfection ; whose relation to our soul is that of bridegroom to bride. He figures the relation of our soul to colour under the metaphor of love ; but as I read the poem, deity as the next higher empirical quality is not different from colour as he conceives it ; save only that for him the spirit of the world is timeless, whereas for us deity is like all other empirical qualities a birth of Time and exists in Time, and timelessness is for us a nonentity, and merely a device for contrasting God's infinite deity with the relative imperfection of the finite things we know, a conception which shall appear in due course.

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  Time engendering within itself in the course of time the series of empirical qualities of which deity is the one next ahead of mind. God is the whole world as possessing the quality of deity. Of such a being the whole world is the ‘body’ and deity is the ‘mind.’ But this possessor of deity is not actual but ideal. As an actual existent, God is the infinite world with its nisus towards deity, or, to adapt a phrase of Leibniz, as big or in travail with deity.

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  That is a scholastic and trivial question. The other question admits an answer. Does infinite deity exist ? The answer is that the world in its infinity tends towards infinite deity, or is pregnant with it, but that infinite deity does not exist ; and we may now add that if it did, God—the actual world possessing infinite deity—would cease to be infinite God and break up into a multiplicity of finite gods, which would be merely a higher race of creatures than ourselves with a God beyond.

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  We are now led to a qualification of the greatest importance. The picture which has been drawn of the infinite God is a concession to our figurative or mythological tendency and to the habit of the religious consciousness to embody its conception of God in an individual shape. Its sole value lies in its indication of the relation that must be understood upon the lines traced by experience to subsist between deity and mind. This is adequate for finite gods, supposing the stage of deity to have been reached. But the infinite God is purely ideal or conceptual. The individual so sketched is not asserted to exist ; the sketch merely gives body and shape, by a sort of anticipation, to the actual infinite God whom, on the basis of experience, speculation declares to exist. As actual, God does not possess the quality of deity but is the universe as tending to that quality. This *nisus* in the universe, though not present to sense, is yet present to reflection upon experience. Only in this sense of straining towards deity can there be an infinite actual God. For, again following the lines of experience, we can see that if the quality of deity were actually attained in the empirical development of the world in Time, we should have not one infinite being possessing deity but many (at least potentially many) finite ones. Beyond these finite gods or angels there would be in turn a new empirical quality looming into view, which for them would be deity—that is, would be for them what deity is for us. Just as when mind emerges it is the distinctive quality of many finite individuals with minds, so when deity actually emerges it would be the distinctive quality of many finite individuals. If the possessor of deity were an existent individual he must be finite and not infinite. Thus there is no actual infinite being with the quality of deity ; but

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  We have not yet asked what the being is which possesses deity. But before attempting to raise the question we may still linger over the quality of deity itself. In the first place it is clear that, while for us men deity is the next higher empirical quality to mind, the description of deity is perfectly general. For any level of existence, deity is the next higher empirical quality. It is therefore a variable quality, and as the world grows in time, deity changes with it. On each level a new quality looms ahead, awfully, which plays to it the part of deity. For us who live upon the level of mind deity is, we can but say, deity. To creatures upon the level of life, deity is still the quality in front, but to us who come later this quality has been revealed as mind. For creatures who possessed only the primary qualities,—mere empirical configurations of space-time,— deity was what afterwards appeared as materiality, and their God was matter, for I am supposing that there is no level of existence nearer to the spatio-temporal than matter. On each level of finite creatures deity is for them some ' unknown ' (though not ' unexperienced ') quality in front, the real nature of which is enjoyed by the creatures of the next level. I do not mean that a material being would in some way think or forecast life ; for there is no thinking in the proper sense till we reach mind. I do not even mean that matter forecasts deity in the sense in which it is sometimes said that to a dog his master is God. For the dog though he may not think, does feel and imagine, and his master is a finite being presented to his senses, for whom he feels attachment. I mean only that corresponding to the sense of a mysterious something which is more than we are and yet is felt in feeling and is conceived by speculation, there is some quality in the purview of material things which lies ahead of material quality. If we think ourselves back into material existence, we should feel ourselves, though matter would be the highest that we know, still swept on in the movement of Time. A merely material universe would not be exhausted by materiality and its lower empirical qualities ; there would still be that restless movement of Time, which is not the mere turning of a squirrel in its cage, but the nisus towards a higher birth. That it is so, events show. How its being so would be ' experienced ' in the material 'soul' may need for its description a greater capacity to strip off human privileges and sympathise with lower experience than most persons, and certainly I, possess.

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  Theism makes appeal to the personal or egotistic side of the religious consciousness, the feeling that in surrender the worshipper still retains his individuality and achieves it in the surrender ; much as in pursuing truth it is still the supreme effort of the investigator to depersonalise himself—so that the candid recognition of facts and the putting aside of prejudice or pettiness are at once a surrender to things and the fulfilment of the truth-seeking personality. It is the religion of the ‘ free ’ man, who consorts with God on terms which still leave the creature independent according to his finite measure. God is the divine individual, awfully removed from man,

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  The responsiveness of God to man is the most vital and distinctive feature in the religious sentiment, most patent in the higher religions, but traceable faintly throughout the history of religion. Even in elementary religion, though there is so large an ingredient of fear or awe, there is also the dependence of man upon God. At a more advanced stage we have the consciousness which is described in the language of philosophy or theology as the sense of identity of God and man: "that art thou" in Brahmanism. The current notion represented by T. H. Green in this country of a divine mind which makes human minds *organic* to itself and works through them (a notion affiliated historically to Kant's doctrine of mind or "consciousness as such" (*ueberhaupt*) which is objective, as contrasted with the empirical mind which in Kant's conception is psychological), is not far removed from this older philosophy. This is the pantheistic sense of the divine response, and it tends towards the feeling of absorption in the divine. In the more theistic religious consciousness this responsiveness culminates in the fatherhood of God. In this conception may be traced the primaeval mystery which is the root of religion; for to the child the father is the mysterious something which he discovers to be like himself, a person by whom he is sustained but who issues arbitrary commands which the child must obey. When religion deepens and is moralised, the apparently arbitrary interpositions of God are attributed humbly not to caprice but to good reasons on the part of God, inscrutable still, but a wise and just providence. But also in the feeling of God's fatherhood, the sense of mystery is coupled with and overshadowed by the sense of sustaining love in his relation to his children and of trustful dependence on their part which is not disappointed but, rather, relieved. Whatever God is, and however he is conceived, there is then this affinity between him and us, and in its higher moods the religious mind conceives itself as doing God's work in doing best the work of man ("then most godlike, being most a man"), and conceives God as speaking to man in his conscience or in his passion for truth or beauty.

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  But the community is one of co-operation. The individual is sustained by trust in God but he wants and claims the help of God as a child his father's, and in turn God reciprocates the worship man pays him and the confidence he reposes in him. There is always the double relationship of need. If man wants God and depends upon him, God wants man, and is so far dependent. Or the same thing may be put otherwise in respect of our feeling of dependence upon God. That feeling is not simply one of helplessness. It is the claim we make for some one to help us. In his admirable book, *The Philosophy of Religion*, Mr. H. Höffding, criticising Schleiermacher's famous reduction of religion to the feeling of dependence, observes that "he does not sufficiently emphasise the point that this dependence is conditioned by an activity, and that it appears at the limits of this activity. Nor does he make it sufficiently obvious that this dependence makes itself felt in the struggle for those values which appear to man to be the highest." 1 In other words, if I understand aright, our dependence is not merely the sense of our feebleness which we discover to be relieved by God, but it is the demand on our part for relief from some one who fulfils our needs and is perfect where we are imperfect. I shall have to speak in the next chapter of whether God is most fitly conceived in the language of values, but apart from this question the above observation appears most just. Even in mysticism this claim for God to satisfy us is retained. Mysticism does not mean utter self-abandonment. It contains, as I remember is remarked somewhere in the book I have been referring to, an element of egotism, which is apparent in the records by St. Theresa of her ecstasies. And indeed a self-abandonment in which there was on one side complete loss and on the other side no gain is scarcely conceivable.

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  It was this generation of deity from lower stages of existence that made intelligible to us the mutual responsiveness of man and God which religion demands. On the one hand, we finites reach out to God, who is the goal of our desire ; on the other hand, God who is sustained by us¹ meets us with support and the "solution of our uneasiness." Worship is co-operation ; and if our sentiment proceeds from a conation adapted to the universe in its forward tendency, God in his turn is adapted to that conation and satisfies it, and it is as satisfying it that we discover his deity. But if this were the whole case the fatherhood of God, though it would describe the relation of love between the two parties to the religious transaction, would be a singularly inappropriate expression of God's relation to us. It becomes appropriate when we reflect that God's deity is sustained by the whole world, and that the contribution of the individual to it is infinitesimal. Our dependence on God, which partly makes us think of him under the figure of a father, is our sense of how God gathers up for us in his person the whole infinite world to which we belong, so that in trusting ourselves to his divinity we are aware of our continuity with the whole in its divine quality. This is the meaning which may be

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  Now the victory of the lower type which is good makes possible the rise of its successor on the higher level. The higher lives by making use of its predecessors, and so the succession of types presents the appearance, when we use human analogies, of having been arranged or designed by some superior power for the sake of its highest type. Space-Time itself, by virtue of its own nisus, elaborates without forethought a “hierarchy of ministration” which if it were produced by mind would imply a vast and all-wise forethought or providence. If we apply to the new quality of deity what we learn from the succession of lower empirical qualities, we conclude by analogy that the process by which good overcomes evil in the region of mind is one of the conditions of the emergence of deity ; so far, that is, as human endeavour contributes to the generation of this quality. Thus goodness or good will is material on which deity is built, and deity is in the line of goodness not of evil. Or we may put the matter otherwise thus, still following the biological and moral precedents. Good will and each lower form of ‘goodness’ are types adapted to the world under the conditions of which their existence is carried on. Such adaptation carries with it the victory over ill-adapted types, which are evil. Deity is the distinctive quality of the higher type of perfection in this line of forms.

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  Primarily God must be defined as the object of the religious emotion or of worship. He is correlative to that emotion or sentiment, as food is correlative to appetite. What we worship, that is God. This is the practical or religious approach to God. But it is insufficient for our theoretical needs. It labours under the defect that so far as religion itself is able to assure us, the object of religion, however vitally rooted in human nature, however responsive to its needs, may be disconnected with the rest of the world. God may be but an ennobling fancy, a being whom we project before us in our imagination, in whom to believe may sustain and inspire us and have its own sufficient justification in its effects on our happiness, but to whom no reality corresponds which can be co-ordinated with familiar realities of the world. The appetite for food arises from internal causes, but the food which satisfies it is external and independent of the organism, and it is known to us apart from the satisfaction which it gives to our hunger. The passion for God is no less a real appetite of our nature, but what if it creates the very object which satisfies it ? Always, indeed, the religious emotion believes in the reality of its object, as something greater than man and independent of him, in whom the finite creature may even in some phases of feeling be submerged ; and it would reject as preposterous the suggestion that God may be a fancy with which it plays, like a lover with a dream of perfection. But the religious sentiment itself can supply us with no such theoretical assurance of reality, and it needs to be supplemented with a metaphysical inquiry, what place if any the object of worship occupies in the general scheme of things.

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  Moreover, it is this distinctive religious appetite, comparable to the appetite for food or drink, which though it does not make its object discovers it. Here too the religious sentiment is in line with the other emotional tendencies. We do not first learn to know the objects to which we respond, but in responding to objects we discover the properties which they possess. Knowledge comes with action or the response to the things which we know. The food is presented to us as flesh or grain through one sort of response ; it is in another sort of response, the expression of the appetite which it arouses, that we discover it to be food and capable of satisfying our hunger. The child we love is presented to us as a small and perhaps helpless human being, but we cognise it as lovable in the caresses and tender care which it elicits from us by the instinctive reaction. Without the reaction which they provoke in us the objects of our emotions would not reveal to us the properties which make them into such objects. If we are inclined to overlook this truth, it is because, as experience grows, familiarity with things may bring about the reaction through a previous cognition. Thus I may dislike a person because I have first learnt he has certain qualities which in general excite repulsion. In the developed life cognition and emotion become intertwined, so that the cognition may seem to be the prior. But in our original experience it is the emotion which discovers the corresponding object of cognition.

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  Thus, if this interpretation be correct, the object of religious sentiment is no mere imagination which corresponds to a subjective and possibly illusory movement of mind. We are in perpetual presence of this object, which stimulates us, some of us more, some less ; is sometimes felt and sometimes left unexperienced according to our condition, just as the most appetising luxuries leave us cold when we are satisfied. It may be entirely absent from some who are insensitive to its peculiar flavour or only faintly sensitive; a man may be partially or wholly deity-blind, as he is tone-deaf, or has no attunement with scientific truth: he may lack the emotional suggestibility for deity. Yet most are suggestible to it in their degree, as most see colours and not mere greys. Of this world with its deity in advance it is true to say what James says of "the mystical or the supernatural region": "the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophical excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal." 1 I only demur to calling the mystical world unseen or even mystical. It is partly seen and partly object of thought, but it is its new quality, which is higher than anything we know, that cannot be seen or understood, though its presence in reality is forced upon us both in philosophical conception and in the feeling it evokes in us of itself.

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  intellectual notion of God revealed to us? The fear of the thunderstorm is not the fear of God, though such fear may be the first channel by which the religious sentiment is provoked (*primus fecit deos timor*). It is merely the feeling that the thunder is terrible. That God is present in the thunderstorm is discovered only in the feeling which is our outgoing towards something or other which works through the thunderstorm or resides therein. That there is this something or other is not the discovery of reflection. The metaphysical interpretation of deity as that to which the world is tending, or any other metaphysical interpretation of God, is as far as possible from being an original discovery of knowledge; it is only possible to reflection working upon primitive notions already acquired. Even the idea that there is something mysterious which we fear or reverence is never in the first instance a piece of cognition; but is revealed to our wondering response, our uneasy astonishment and curiosity. It is the feeling or emotion which images the object, not the idea which induces the emotion. When we ask how we come by the cognition of God we must answer that, as with love and hate and appetite and aversion, it is because the world itself provokes in us a specific response which makes us aware, no matter in how primitive a form, of God, and this specific reaction is what has been described above as a going out to something in the world with which we are in communion.

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  Having thus realised that the relation of deity to mind is not peculiar to us but arises at each level between the next higher quality and the distinctive quality of that level, we can at once pass to another observation. We cannot tell what is the nature of deity, of our deity, but we can be certain that it is not mind, or if we use the term spirit as equivalent to mind or any quality of the order of mind, deity is not spirit, but something different from it in kind. God, the being which possesses deity, must be *also* spirit, for according to analogy, deity presupposes spirit, just as spirit or mind presupposes in its possessor life, and life physico-chemical material processes. But though God must be spiritual in the same way as he must be living and material and spatio-temporal, his deity is not spirit. To think so would be like thinking that mind is purely life, or life purely physico-chemical. The neural complexity which is equivalent to mind is not merely physiological, but a selected physiological constellation which is the bearer of mind, though it is also physiological, because it has physiological relations to what is purely physiological. That complexity and refinement of spirit which is equivalent to deity is something new, and while it is also spirit it is not merely spirit. Deity is therefore, according to the pattern of the growth of […]

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  There is a further consequence of the difference between deity as a quality in the hierarchy of qualities and the idea of value. Good and great men seem to us to have in them something divine, and the description is just if it is taken to mean that, being better and greater than the rest of us, they point the way to deity, and prepare the way as leaders in the human contribution to the world-endeavour. Even God himself does not as actual God possess deity attained, but only the nisus towards it. Men of transcendent gifts of perfection are thus in their degree exemplars of this nisus. The description is false if it means that they in any sense possess the divine quality or even adumbrate it. Deity on such conception would be no more than the perfection of manhood, whereas it is something which transcends in kind the most transcendent manhood. The ordinary theism, therefore, when it postulates a human intermediary between us and a God who is conceived as endowed with deity actually attained, acts consistently in believing the intermediator to be more than man, human and divine at once—purchasing consistency at the cost of interposing the conception of a miraculous person without parallel in the world.

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  Only this proviso must be added. The mental structure of which a portion more complex and subtle is the bearer of deity, must not be thought necessarily to be a human mind or aggregation of such, but only to be of the mental order. To assume it to be of the nature of human mind would be as if a race of seaweeds were to hold that mind when it comes (the quality of deity for seaweeds) must be founded on the life of seaweeds, and minds the offspring of seaweeds. What form the finite god would assume we cannot know, and it is idle to guess. The picture has been drawn merely in order to give some kind of definiteness to the vague idea of a higher quality of existence, deity as founded upon the highest order of existence we know. There is always a danger that such attempts at definiteness where precise knowledge from the nature of the case is out of the question may seem a little ridiculous. Fortunately when we leave the finite god and endeavour to form a conception of the infinite God in his relation to things, we may avail ourselves of what is useful in the picture and avoid the danger of seeming to affect a prevision of how things in the future will come to be. We use the picture merely in order to understand how the whole world can be thought of as possessing deity.

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  WITH this clue in our minds we may proceed to discuss the various empirical qualities that characterise existent things at their respective levels, as distinct from the categories. But it will help us to preface the discussion by attempting to sum up in a formula the relations of Space and Time as they have been exhibited in our analysis of Space-Time. The formula may be received as a hypothesis to be judged by its success in unifying the different forms of empirical existence, and it presupposes the conclusions reached in the preceding chapter. It is that Time as a whole and in its parts bears to Space as a whole and its corresponding parts a relation analogous to the relation of mind 1 to its equivalent bodily or nervous basis ; or to put the matter shortly that Time is the mind of Space and Space the body of Time. According to this formula the world as a whole and each of its parts is built on the model with which we are familiar in ourselves as persons, that is as union of mind and body, and in

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  Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929) ↗ · ¶ 2301 · ¶ 2304 · ¶ 2335 · ¶ 2276 · ¶ 2279 · ¶ 2286 — quoted passages in context

  The wisdom of subjective aim prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system—its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy—woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image—and it is but an image—the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.

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  [page 526] with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.

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  But the principle of universal relativity is not to be stopped at the consequent nature of God. This nature itself passes into the temporal world according to its gradation of relevance to the various concrescent occasions. There are thus four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality. There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in actuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation. Secondly, there is the temporal phase of physical origination, with its multiplicity of actualities. In this phase full actuality is attained; but there is deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other. This phase derives its determinate conditions from the first phase. Thirdly, there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity. In everlastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality. This phase derives the conditions of its being from the two antecedent phases. In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.

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  [page 520] one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncer- tainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.

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  The history of theistic philosophy exhibits various stages of combination of these three diverse ways of entertaining the problem. There is, however, in the Galilean origin of Christianity yet another suggestion which does not fit very well with any of the three main strands of thought. It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love; and it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is

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  [page 522] sider God in the abstraction of a primordial actuality, we must ascribe to him neither fulness of feeling, nor consciousness. He is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that, by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, untrammelled by reference to any particular course of things. It is deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass. The *particularities* of the actual world presuppose *it*; while *it* merely presupposes the *general* metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification. The primordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character.

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  Star Maker (1937) ↗ · ¶ 610 — quoted passage in context

  In my agony I cried out against my ruthless maker. I cried out that, after all, the creature was nobler than the creator; for the creature loved and craved love, even from the star that was the Star Maker; but the creator, the Star Maker, neither loved nor had need of love.

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• Bentham and Mill (both now held): “push-pin is as good as poetry” — Bentham’s doctrine in Mill’s words; the exact pedigree, and what the two texts add to sheets 4–6, is at §2.2. (Earlier editions of this analysis sourced the wording to Mill’s Utilitarianism; it is from his 1838 essay “Bentham.” The lowbrow/highbrow split maps the higher-and-lower-pleasures amendment Mill later made in Utilitarianism — with Stapledon siding with Mill against Bentham, then going further than Mill would: not better pleasures, but a goal beyond pleasure.) The unexpected yield of the 1838 essay is how much of the lecture’s own machinery is already in it — the “no impulsion toward difficult living” indictment, and the moral-sense mockery that sheet 6’s intuitionism knowingly accepts (§2.2).
  Mill, “Bentham” (1838) ↗ · ¶ 32 — quoted passage in context

  The first question regarding any man of speculation is: what is his theory of human life? In the minds of many philosophers, any theory they have of this sort is submerged, and it would be a revelation to them to have it pointed out in their writings as others can see it, unconsciously moulding everything to its own likeness. But Bentham always knew his own premises, and made his reader know them; he did not leave to conjecture the theoretical grounds of his practical conclusions. Few great thinkers have provided the means of assigning with so much certainty their exact conception of man and of man’s life. Man is conceived by Bentham as a being susceptible of pleasures and pains, and governed in all his conduct partly •by the different varieties of self-interest and the passions commonly classed as ‘selfish’, partly •by sympathies (or occasionally antipathies) towards other beings. And here Bentham’s conception of human nature stops. He does not exclude religion: the prospect of divine rewards and punishments he includes under the head of ‘self-regarding interest’, and the devotional feeling under that of sympathy with God. But the whole of the impelling or restraining principles that he recognises—whether of this or of another world—are either self-love, or love or hatred towards other sentient beings. There can be no doubt about what he thought on this subject: he has drawn out a ‘Table of the Springs of Action’, an explicit listing and classification of human motives, with their various names, laudatory, vituperative, and neutral. I recommend this table to the study of those who want to understand his philosophy. Man is never recognised by him as a being capable of pursuing spiritual perfection as an end, of desiring for its own sake the conformity of his own character to his standard of excellence, without hope of good or fear of evil from any source but his own inward consciousness. Even in the more limited form of conscience, this great fact in human nature escapes him. Nothing is more curious than the absence of recognition in any of Bentham’s writings of the existence of conscience as something distinct from •philanthropy, from •affection for God or man, and from •self-interest in this world or in the next. He carefully abstains from any of the phrases that others use to acknowledge such a fact.1

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• Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–34; now held): “the proper study of mankind is man” — quoted in the definition, and quietly subverted by the whole second half. The full context sharpens the irony well past what the first editions of this analysis could claim. In situ the line is a prohibition, not a charter: “Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan” — and the first epistle has spent its length condemning exactly the upward speculation the lecture will defend (“In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies; / All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies… Men would be angels, angels would be gods”). Pope’s man sits fixed on his “isthmus of a middle state,” “in doubt to deem himself a god, or beast” — a middle station in an ordained chain, where the lecture’s margin makes man “transitional & scarcely a beginning,” a middle moment in a movement (the sheets’ anthropology is Pope’s isthmus set in motion; “the glory, jest, and riddle of the world” would have served sheet 27 unchanged). And the epistle closes by commanding the very consolation sheet 28 forbids: “Submit… All partial evil, universal good: / And, spite of pride in erring reason’s spite, / One truth is clear, whatever is, is right” — the doctrine-shaped comfort (“therefore all is well”) that even Waking World lets slip and the lecture’s discipline strikes out (§3.5). So the borrowed couplet runs against both halves of its source: Stapledon licenses the presumption Pope forbids (as myth, never doctrine) and refuses the assurance Pope commands. Whether the reversal was deliberate the notes cannot say; that the humanists’ favourite couplet was written as an argument for submission to an unscannable God is an irony worth having on the record.
  Pope, Essay on Man ↗ · stanza 38 · stanza 22 · stanza 33 — quoted passages in context

  I. Know, then, thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasoning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused, or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

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  IV. Go, wiser thou! and, in thy scale of sense, Weigh thy opinion against providence; Call imperfection what thou fanciest such, Say, here He gives too little, there too much; Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust, Yet cry, if man’s unhappy, God’s unjust; If man alone engross not Heaven’s high care, Alone made perfect here, immortal there: Snatch from His hand the balance and the rod, Re-judge His justice, be the God of God. In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies. Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods. Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell, Aspiring to be angels, men rebel: And who but wishes to invert the laws Of order, sins against the Eternal Cause.

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  X. Cease, then, nor order imperfection name: Our proper bliss depends on what we blame. Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee. Submit. In this, or any other sphere, Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear: Safe in the hand of one disposing Power, Or in the natal, or the mortal hour. All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

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• Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927; now held, in Strachey’s 1961 translation): the sceptical engine of the 1930s, deployed twice and answered twice with the genetic-fallacy counter and the tu quoque. The held text shows this book to be the closest comparator, and possibly the immediate source (sheet 12 names only “psycho-analysis”; the full weighing, including what tells against a specific-source claim, is at §2.4) — the wish-derivation (“fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind”), the Father-derivation of the personal God, even the extension of the solvent to secular ideals are the book’s own moves; so, less comfortably for sheet 12, are two concessions its summary never registers (“An illusion is not the same thing as an error”; the tu quoque anticipated and answered with corrigibility). The full confrontation, including the odd convergence by which the salute comes out “irreligious in the truest sense” on Freud’s definition and unindicted by his psychology, is at §2.4. The biography now puts a documented spine under that weighing: Stapledon’s Freud was first-hand, deep, and early — in 1922 “he immured himself for days in the British Museum Reading Room from opening to closing time, devouring Freud,” Crossley’s list running from The Interpretation of Dreams through Totem and Taboo — and the resistance is dated to the same workbench: “Dissatisfied with what he saw as the rationalist excesses of orthodox Freudianism, he altered his topic from the psychological study of symbols to a philosophical analysis of the problem of meaning.” Sheet 12’s duel with “psycho-analysis” was therefore a position some twelve years in the making, held by a reader who had taken the trouble to know the opponent whole — qualified resistance after immersion, not dismissal at second hand.
  Crossley, Speaking for the Future (1994) ↗ · ¶ 683 · ¶ 685 — quoted passages in context

  In age and temperament Olaf was not a conventional graduate student. He planned his course of study while working up his German and preparing his syllabus for two extension courses in Shakespeare for the WEA. With evening lectures to prepare and a wife and child at home, he had little time to socialize with other students; he became friendly only with another man in his late thirties, J. E. Turner, and an exchange student, Kuo Chieh Chang (on whom the young Chinese physicist in *Last and First Men* may be based).[38] At first, Olaf found the M.A. program intimidating: "I am technically deficient," he thought after listening to another student's seminar paper on the relativity of knowledge. Following another meeting he wrote, "I get rather lost in the discussion."[39] The war had left him out of touch with new trends in philosophy and psychology, and he determined to repair his deficiencies. Early in 1922 he immured himself for days in the British Museum Reading Room from opening to closing time, devouring Freud: *The Interpretation of Dreams*, *Leonardo da Vinci*, *Delusion and Dream*, *Theory of Sex*, *Totem and Taboo*, *Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious*. "Ever so much to read."[40]

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  Stapledon found seminar papers hard to write because they required compressing ideas into a neat thirty-minute presentation when he wanted to arrive at "epoch-making conclusions." He would work night and day to produce 10,000-word essays that he then had to cut by two-thirds, often feeling that the result looked like "a most wildly speculative effort." Mair urged Olaf not to trim the venturesome and speculative ideas from his papers but to let them "be tried on the dog" (as he liked to describe the process of reading a paper to the seminar); making a respectable thesis of them would come later.[42] By term's end Stapledon felt intellectually secure enough to declare for a Ph.D. Dissatisfied with what he saw as the rationalist excesses of orthodox Freudianism, he altered his topic from the psychological study of symbols to a philosophical analysis of the problem of meaning.

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  Freud, Future of an Illusion (1927) ↗ · ¶ 111 — quoted passage in context

  I THINK we have prepared the way sufficiently for an answer to both these questions. It will be found if we turn our attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas. These, which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfilments shall take place. Answers to the riddles that tempt the curiosity of man, such as how the universe began or what the relation is between body and mind, are developed in conformity with the underlying assumptions of this system. It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father-complex—conflicts which it has never wholly overcome—are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.

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• Wordsworth, the Intimations Ode (1807; now held): the one poet the notes invoke by name outside the planned readings — sheet 24’s “(Wordsworth said so) but I am not sure.” The Ode is the doctrine’s locus classicus (“Heaven lies about us in our infancy”), the identification is ours, and the poem’s own closing turn — grief refused, “strength in what remains behind,” “the philosophic mind” — runs the same maturation line the sheet prefers to the doctrine it doubts (§2.6(b)).
  Wordsworth, Intimations Ode (1807) ↗ · stanza 8 · stanza 13 — quoted passages in context

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

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  Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song! And let the young Lambs bound As to the tabor's sound! We in thought will join your throng, Ye that pipe and ye that play, Ye that through your hearts to-day Feel the gladness of the May! What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; I only have relinquished one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway. I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born Day Is lovely yet; The Clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

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• Marxism and Fascism: treated as the two live humanisms-become-religions of the moment — Communism as naive humanism with a two-stage theory; Fascism seen through the Communist indictment he reports and half-concedes (“a mystical Race deity” is that argument’s phrase, from sheet 20) and through sheet 29’s account of what undoctrinal worship deforms into. His even-handedness here is the platform manner of the WEA tutor who taught in Merseyside working men’s classes for decades.
• Eddington’s “mentalism” (sheet 31) — the fashionable idealist physics of The Nature of the Physical World — listed among the fashions not to be taken “too seriously”; astronomy’s “expanding space” and “gigantic inconceivables” (sheet 26) are Eddington’s and Jeans’s popular cosmology, which Stapledon absorbed and transmuted.
• Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903; now held) — not named in 1934 but named in 1946 (“egotism of humanity, self-pity for Man — cp Russell’s Free Man’s Worship”). Read whole, the essay proves to be the salute’s nearest kin and its exact inversion — which is presumably why the 1946 notes reach for it as the thing the position must not be. The two share nearly everything but the object. Russell’s cosmos is “omnipotent but blind”; his essay, like the lecture, demands renunciation as the price of worship (“the gate of the cavern is despair”), makes Tragedy the proudest art, and damns the worship of mere Power as “prostrate submission to evil” — sheet 25’s herd-and-force diagnosis, thirty years early. Even Star Maker’s closing image is anticipated with the valuation reversed: Russell’s free men see “the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship” on a dark ocean from which “a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge” — the two lights of 1937 (§3.6), with the second light experienced only as hostile night. At the fork both men see — “Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness?” — they take opposite branches. Russell rules that “the non-human world is unworthy of our worship” and sends the free man “to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built,” on “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.” To Stapledon that is the “mutual improvement and admiration society” consecrated: worship of “the God created by our own love of the good” is, in Waking World’s words of the lecture’s own year, “really to worship our own nature made perfect… That is just where the trouble lies” — and the 1946 margin files the essay accordingly, under “egotism of humanity, self-pity for Man.” Russell has a reply waiting, and it is the sharpest objection the lecture ever faces: worship of what may destroy you is the religion of Moloch, “the cringing submission of the slave” before unworthy Power. The exchange is genuinely symmetrical — each reads the other as idolatry, self-worship on one side, power-worship on the other — and the lecture’s whole defence is lodged in its definitions: what the salute honours is not Power but Beauty; it claims no favour, expects no rescue, and (sheet 28) forbids itself the comfort that would make submission pay. Whether that answers Job’s comforters or merely relocates them, the reader must judge; but the 1946 notes also quote Russell with approval on the other flank (“It is nobler to doubt than to believe,” sheet 5) — ally in scepticism, foil in worship.
  Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903) ↗ · ¶ 8 · ¶ 18 · ¶ 19 · ¶ 11 · ¶ 23 · ¶ 7 · ¶ 12 · ¶ 9 — quoted passages in context

  How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

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  When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rules of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world -- in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death -- the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.

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  But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be -- Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity -- to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.

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  But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognised as the creation of our own conscience?

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  Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

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  Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

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  The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false "recognition of facts" which fails to recognise that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.

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  The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch -- as such creeds may be generically called -- is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.

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  Waking World (1934) ↗ · ¶ 266 — quoted passage in context

  conceived in this way, should be the one object of our loyalty. He may perhaps even feel that what matters most in the universe is this age-long adventure of waking into the most clear-sighted and large-hearted aliveness, of waking into the full, the true ‘humanity’, whether this is to be achieved by our own species or by beings alien to ourselves in remote parts of the universe. Yet there is something else to take into account, something more difficult to describe. The worship of mankind or, as I would rather call it, loyalty in the human enterprise, is indeed part of the true and wholly satisfying and most alive kind of worship; and Christian love of our fellow men is also part of it. But I at least cannot feel that love of our fellows and loyalty in the great adventure of mankind together make up the whole of religion. For, after all, to worship mankind is only to worship ourselves. For mankind is nothing but all of us together, striving in our different ways to make the best of life. Indeed, even to worship a loving God is really to worship our own nature made perfect. All the characters which are attributed to a benevolent and almighty and omniscient deity are idealizations of the distinctively human capacities. That is just where the trouble lies. We are so easily trapped into thinking that our own nature, perfected, is the finest thing there is, or can be. When a man is in the mood of unqualified loyalty to mankind, the thought may occur to him that, sooner or later, even if men do succeed at last in making the really splendid human world which at present we can only dimly imagine, that world will almost certainly be destroyed. There are many ways in which it might come to an end, but one way, if the others are avoided, seems almost inevitable. Our sun will cool, and his planets will be frozen. Even if men were to escape from the solar system, which is unlikely, wherever they were to go, they would be faced sooner or later with a

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• Blake and Shelley: the planned readings. The Tyger’s “fearful symmetry” is the numinous Other; Ozymandias is what becomes of man-worship.
  Blake, “The Tyger” (1794) ↗ · stanza 2 — quoted passage in context

  Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

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• His own Waking World, published that same year (see §3.5): the lecture is the book’s central chapter taken on the road, and the two texts gloss each other line by line.
• H. G. Wells — whose enthusiastic letter about Last and First Men had opened a correspondence between the two men — embodied the reigning rational-utopian humanism of the decade: the world-state, the awakened species, man as the measure of the project. The lecture’s “highbrow humanism” is, among other things, the Wellsian program — endorsed as necessary and then declared insufficient. That verdict is Stapledon’s own, twice over: the c. 1928 essay files Wells (with Meredith and Shaw) among the prophets whose faith locates man’s importance “not in his individuality but in his instrumentality” to a goal “which he himself has not yet clearly conceived,” and the later Science and Literature lecture notes sum him “prophet of scientific utopia: in all his work.” The program’s definitive fictional statement is now held for the comparison (comparison-tier — no document ties it to the lecture): Men Like Gods (1923), where perfected man is history’s terminus — “Here at last, established and secure, were peace, power, health, happy activity, length of days and beauty” — reached by breeding and education rather than grace, in a Utopia whose Nature is disenchanted (“She is not awful, she is horrible… She does not heed, she does not care”) and where pity itself “betrayed itself a vicious desire.” The quarrel in one line: Wells’s Utopian rules that Nature “is not awful”; the lecture’s Other is exactly the awful — the tremendum — and worship of it is man’s crowning function (§2.6). And the dialogue is now documented in the other direction: in Star Begotten (1937; now held, excerpted publicly — in US copyright), Wells’s own late superman fantasia of Martian-minded children, the fiction names his correspondent — “You know that man Olaf Stapledon has already tried something of the sort in a book called Last and First Men” — announces “A new sort of mind is coming into the world,” and walks to the very edge the 1934 lecture starts from (“you are foretelling now the end of common humanity”) only to greet it with hope and continuity: no Other, no salute, but a sleeping child, “Afraid of change? Afraid of the renascence to come?” Wells reaching the lecture’s own discovery — man transitional — and keeping the humanism is the corpus’s cleanest fictional specimen of the better-future-man creed the lecture judged not enough. (The Stapledon–Wells correspondence itself, published by Crossley in 1982, remains a planned acquisition — followups.md.)
  rare pieces (1908–49) ↗ · ¶ 59 — quoted passage in context

  One poet of the movement is Meredith, with his devotion to the Spirit of Earth. And he also links it both with earlier romanticism and with a later classicism. He admired nature less for her appearance, as Wordsworth did, than for her vitality. And man he admired less for his individuality, as Browning did, than for being Earth's self-conscious intelligence. But Meredith is more than an apostle of the faith in Earth and Man. His Comic Spirit gropes towards the mood of detachment which I shall presently describe. Meanwhile we may note in Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells the same dualism of good and evil grounded in the dynamic nature of life, the same fervent championship, the same sense that man's real importance lies not in his individuality but in his instrumentality to the achievement of a goal which he himself has not yet clearly conceived. These writers have contributed to the faith which inspires militant "Labour" today, which distinguishes so sharply between the elect and the damned, which claims from the individual a puritanical loyalty to a certain social ideal or formula, which in fact is the modem, popular, and social-democratic form of Calvinism. Shaw, like Meredith, is saved by humour from rigid sectarianism, and gropes sometimes beyond the moral view; but Wells is more strictly confined within his faith. Bertrand Russell in his social writings, and in spite of his professed ethical scepticism, sometimes assumes the mood of righteous indignation; but though he renders allegiance to the ideal of cultural development he is also detached, and capable of dispassionate salutation.

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  Wells, Men Like Gods (1923) ↗ · ¶ 1568 · ¶ 498 · ¶ 1452 — quoted passages in context

  After a time he went back to the side of this view-place up which he had come, and regarded the great valley that went out towards the sea. The word Pisgah floated through his mind. For indeed below him was the Promised Land of human desires. Here at last, established and secure, were peace, power, health, happy activity, length of days and beauty. All that we seek was found here and every dream was realized.

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  "These Earthlings do not yet dare to see what our Mother Nature is. At the back of their minds is still the desire to abandon themselves to her. They do not see that except for our eyes and wills, she is purposeless and blind. She is not awful, she is horrible. She takes no heed to our standards, nor to any standards of excellence. She made us by accident; all her children are bastards--undesired; she will cherish or expose them, pet or starve or torment without rhyme or reason. She does not heed, she does not care. She will lift us up to power and intelligence, or debase us to the mean feebleness of the rabbit or the slimy white filthiness of a thousand of her parasitic inventions. There must be good in her because she made all that is good in us--but also there is endless evil. Do not you Earthlings see the dirt of her, the cruelty, the insane indignity of much of her work?"

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  Since she was always close at hand, she filled for him perhaps more than her legitimate space in the Utopian spectacle. She lay across it like a shadow. He thought very frequently about her and about the pity and resentment against life and vigour that she embodied. In a world of fear, weakness, infection, darkness and confusion, pity, the act of charity, the alms and the refuge, the deed of stark devotion, might show indeed like sweet and gracious presences; but in this world of health and brave enterprises, pity betrayed itself a vicious desire. Crystal, Utopian youth, was as hard as his name. When he had slipped one day on some rocks and twisted and torn his ankle, he had limped but he had laughed. When Mr. Barnstaple was winded on a steep staircase Crystal was polite rather than sympathetic. So Lychnis had found no confederate in the dedication of her life to sorrow; even from Mr. Barnstaple she could win no sympathy. He perceived that indeed so far as temperament went he was a better Utopian than she was. To him as to Utopia it seemed rather an occasion for gladness than sorrow that her man and her children had met death fearlessly. They were dead; a brave stark death; the waters still glittered and the sun still shone. But her loss had revealed some underlying racial taint in her, something very ancient in the species, something that Utopia was still breeding out only very slowly, the dark sacrificial disposition that bows and responds to the shadow. It was strange and yet perhaps it was inevitable that Mr. Barnstaple should meet again in Utopia that spirit which earth knows so well, the spirit that turns from the Kingdom of Heaven to worship the thorns and the nails, which delights to represent its God not as the Resurrection and the Life but as a woeful and defeated cadaver.

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  Wells, Star Begotten (1937) ↗ · ¶ 349 · ¶ 563 · ¶ 711 · ¶ 824 — quoted passages in context

  'Exactly. You know that man Olaf Stapledon has already tried something of the sort in a book called Last and First Men. Some day we shall certainly have to come to a general psychology independent of the human type, just as now these young men in the Society of Experimental Biology are getting away from the highly specialized peculiarities of human physiology towards a general physiological science. Now away there in Mars, as any astronomer will tell you, there are all the conditions necessary for a sort of life similar, if not identically similar, to life upon earth, the same elements--air, water, a temperature range not widely different. The probabilities are in favour of there having been a parallel--a roughly parallel evolution. Parallel but in some ways different. The gravitational energy, atmospheric pressure, and suchlike things are different and that would mean differences in lightness, vigour, and size. Martian plants and animals would probably run much bigger. Much bigger.'

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  'Let's see how far we have got,' said Keppel. 'Let us try to disentangle as far as we can the pure guess-fantasy of an extra-terrestrial intervention, from the established realities that Davis has been elucidating. A new sort of mind is coming into the world, with a new, simpler, clearer, and more powerful way of thinking. That I think is manifest. It has already got into operation individually here and there and produced a sort of disorder of innovation in human affairs. But so far these new minds haven't got together for any sort of associated living. So far. They are hardly aware of themselves, much less of each other. They are scattered about anyhow. All that, I think, seems to be established?'

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  'Keppel,' said the doctor, 'let us be plain about this--you are foretelling now the end of common humanity. No less. This would not be human life. This new world is something beyond all ordinary experience, something alien.'

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  The child lay on its side in its cot in a dreamless sleep. It scarcely seemed to breathe. The expression of that flushed little face with its closed eyes was one of veiled determination. One small clenched fist peeped over the coverlet. Afraid of change? Afraid of the renascence to come?

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• J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929; now held) — the period’s actual program of engineered self-transcendence, and a documented antagonist rather than a shelf-neighbour. The Science and Literature notes name him beside Haldane, and their gloss is content-accurate — “abolition of pain, & re-instatement [of] ð Devil” condenses the book’s own mechanism, the body abolished and “Even the pain nerves… pressed into service to report any failure in the associated mechanism.” The program out-supermans every rival on this list: “Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is actually more in the true tradition of a further evolution” — the brain re-housed in its cylinder, compound minds abolishing individual death, humanity at the limit “becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light,” while unimproved mankind keeps the earth as “a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment.” And Bernal diagnoses in advance the very hunger the lecture disciplines into the salute: “all, even the least religious, retain in their minds when they think of the future, an idea of the deus ex machina, of some transcendental, superhuman event which will, without their help, bring the universe to perfection or destruction” — a want to be outgrown, where the lecture keeps the want and strips it of doctrine. The contact is dated, two-directional, and raw: seven weeks before South Place, Bernal reviewed Waking World in the Listener (7 November 1934), and the biography preserves both the verdict — Stapledon accused “of demanding from science a mystical ‘beatific vision,’” his reduced religion hardly “worth preserving at all” — and the wound, in the letter of that January: “I’m afraid Waking World has damned me in the eyes of the scientists… they’re so sure of themselves.” The lecturer walked into South Place with the period’s chief engineering-transcendentist on record against precisely the worship the lecture defends — and answered with the salute, while admiring the engineering: Star Maker’s preface thanks “Mr. J. D. Bernal’s fascinating little book” for its artificial planets. With Bernal held, the Huxley entry below gains its third corner: in Huxley’s creed man transcends by remaining man; in Bernal’s a self-made minority transcends by ceasing to be man; in the lecture the transcendent is not us at all, and what is owed it is worship.
  Bernal, World, Flesh and Devil (1929) ↗ · ¶ 36 · ¶ 43 · ¶ 47 · ¶ 69 · ¶ 70 — quoted passages in context

  […] use of the many superfluous nerves with which our body is endowed for various auxiliary and motor services. We badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current, and chemical organs of many kinds. We may perhaps be able to train a great number of hot and cold and pain receiving nerves to take over these functions; on the motor side we shall soon be, if we are not already, obliged to control mechanisms for which two hands and feet are an entirely inadequate number; and, apart from that, the direction of mechanism by pure volition would enormously simplify its operation. Where the motor mechanism is not primarily electrical, it might be simpler and more effective to use nerve-muscle preparations instead of direct nerve connections. Even the pain nerves may be pressed into service to report any failure in the associated mechanism. A mechanical stage, utilizing some or all of these alterations of the bodily form might, if the initial experiments were successful in the sense of leading to a tolerable existence, become the regular culmination to ordinary life. Whether this should ever be so for the whole of the population we will discuss later, but for the moment we may attempt to picture what would at this period be the course of existence for a transformable human being.

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  The new man must appear to those who have not contemplated him before as a strange, monstrous and inhuman creature, but he is only the logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present. It may be argued that this tampering with bodily mechanisms is as unnecessary as it is difficult, that all the increase of control needed may be obtained by extremely responsive mechanisms outside the unaltered human body. But though it is possible that in the early stages a surgically transformed man would be at a disadvantage in capacity of performance to a normal, healthy man, he would still be better off than a dead man. Although it is possible that man has far to go before his inherent physiological and psychological make-up becomes the limiting factor to his development, this must happen sooner or later, and it is then that the mechanized man will begin to show a definite advantage. Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is actually more in the true tradition of a further evolution.

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  The new life would be more plastic, more directly controllable and at the same time more variable and more permanent than that produced by the triumphant opportunism of nature. Bit by bit the heritage of the direct line of mankind - the heritage of the original life emerging on the face of the world - would dwindle, and in the end disappear effectively, being preserved perhaps as some curious relic, while the new life which conserves none of the substance and all of the spirit of the old would take its place and continue its development. Such a change would be as important as that in which life first appeared on the earth's surface and might be as gradual and imperceptible. Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light. That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.

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  […] leave humanity behind; from another, humanity - the humanity that counts - might seem to change en bloc, leaving behind in a relatively primitive state those too stupid or too stubborn to change. The latter view suggests another biological analogy: there may not be room for both types in the same world and the old mechanism of extinction will come into play. The better organized beings will be obliged in self-defense to reduce the numbers of the others, until they are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them. If, as we may well suppose, the colonization of space will have taken place or be taking place while these changes are occurring, it may offer a very convenient solution. Mankind - the old mankind - would be left in undisputed possession of the earth, to be regarded by the inhabitants of the celestial spheres with a curious reverence. The world might, in fact, be transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment.

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  That prospect should please both sides: it should satisfy the scientists in their aspirations towards further knowledge and further experience, and the humanists in their looking for the good life on earth. But somehow it fails by the very virtue of its being a possible and probable solutions on the lines of our own knowledge. We do not really expect or want the probable; all, even the least religious, retain in their minds when they think of the future, an idea of the deus ex machina, of some transcendental, superhuman event which will, without their help, bring the universe to perfection or destruction. We want the future to be mysterious and full of supernatural power; and yet these very aspirations, so totally removed from the physical world, have built this material civilization and will go on building it into the future so long as there remains any relation between aspiration and action. But can we count on this? Or, rather, have we not here the criterion which will decide the direction of human development? We are on the point of being able to see the effects of our actions and their probable consequences in the future; we hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time, as a function of our own action. Having seen it, are we to to turn away from something that offends the very nature of our earliest desires, or is the recognition of our new powers sufficient to change those desires into the service of the future which they will have to bring about?

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  Crossley, Speaking for the Future (1994) ↗ · ¶ 887 — quoted passage in context

  Although Stapledon and Wells had real ideological and temperamental differences, a reviewer of *Waking World* noticed one remarkable similarity: "Mr. Stapledon is developing just as Mr. Wells did. He began by producing a firstrate scientific romance, 'Last and First Men,' corresponding to 'The Time Machine.' Now he has produced a non-fictional account of the world to which he hopes we are waking, just as Mr. Wells did in 'Anticipations.' "[27] Scientists, however, were as unenthusiastic about *Waking World* as was Wells. The physicist J. D. Bernal, whose work Olaf admired, thought it hopelessly, piously old-fashioned. He accused the author of demanding from science a mystical "beatific vision" without realizing that science did not pronounce on ultimate values. Stapledon was merely revisiting the Stoicism of the later Roman Empire, which blindly worshiped anything that exists simply because it exists: "No other religion may be possible to an intelligent and honest man in these days, but we may well ask whether religion which has lost so much of its content is worth preserving at all." The criticism wounded Olaf because he relished the praise scientific readers had heaped on *Last and First Men*. "I'm afraid *Waking World* has damned me in the eyes of the scientists. It's sad, because I have usually a dog-like respect for them. And yet—they're so *sure* of themselves."[28]

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  Star Maker (1937) ↗ · ¶ 12 — quoted passage in context

  Certain ideas about artificial planets were suggested by Mr. J. D. Bernal's fascinating little book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I hope he will not strongly disapprove of my treatment of them.

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• J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927; now held) — the one text on this list with a documented causal role in the fiction: Crossley records that “The Last Judgment,” acquired in 1928, “had a far greater impact on the decision to extend” Last and First Men beyond its first outline than any other text, Stapledon’s annotated copy (the 1928 printing) being in the Liverpool archive; the essay’s guesses can now be walked into the novel in the held texts (§3.3). The lecture-adjacent yield is the essay’s terminus: Haldane’s forty-million-year Venusians are a deliberately bred “super-organism” whose members have shed “such self-regarding sentiments as pride” and with them pity — defined away as “an unpleasant feeling aroused by the suffering of other individuals” — living every moment “under the influence of the voice of the community” as “components of a super-organism or deity, possibly the only one in space-time.” A race-organism worshipped from inside is exactly the shape the lecture’s herd-worship and Race-deity arguments (sheets 20, 25) exist to forbid — and the book’s closing pages even bind the two traditions this section maps into one package Stapledon owned: religion defined by its “emotional attitude towards the universe as a whole,” and, on the next page, Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity cited for “the emergence of a new kind of being which will bear the same relation to mind as do mind to life and life to matter.” Emergent deity plus cosmic emotion, from the scientist the notes cite by name twice — and whose 1935 letter on Odd John (§3.11) shows him refusing the great-man politics as firmly as Stapledon refused his race-organism.
  Crossley, Speaking for the Future (1994) ↗ · ¶ 808 — quoted passage in context

  More recent works also made an impact. In 1923, Stapledon read Wells's *Outline of History* and in 1927 J. W. Dunne's *Experiment in Time*, the first a model of synoptic and generalizing history and the second an investigation of telepathy that challenged the commonsense metaphor of time's arrow. He also read Gerald Heard's *Ascent of Humanity*, but found its notions of psychological evolution unreliable. An essay acquired in 1928, during the early phase of *Last and First Men*'s composition, had a far greater impact on the decision to extend the book beyond the relatively modest confines of the outline in “The Future Speaks”: J. B. S. Haldane's “The Last Judgment.” Haldane's speculative apocalypse is a cornucopia of unelaborated but provocative guesses and fancies about the future, around many of which Olaf built entire episodes—the depletion of fossil fuels and the destruction of the earth by its disintegrating moon, the development of new human senses and the abolition of pain through eugenic manipulation, the terraforming of Venus and the fashioning of a stumpy dwarf humanity to colonize Jupiter.[24]

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  Haldane, Possible Worlds (1927) ↗ · ¶ 659 · ¶ 661 · ¶ 674 · ¶ 677 — quoted passages in context

  ‘The modes of behaviour which our ancestors gradually overcame, and which only recur as the rarest aberrations among ourselves, included not only such self-regarding sentiments as pride and a personal preference concerning mating. They embraced emotions such as pity (an unpleasant feeling aroused by the suffering of other individuals). In a life completely dedicated to membership of a super-organism the one is as superfluous as the other, though altruism found its place in the emotional basis of the far looser type of society prevalent on earth.

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  ‘The history of our planet need not be given here. After the immense efforts of the first colonizers, we have settled down as members of a super-organism with no limits to its possible progress. The evolution of the individual has been brought under complete social control, and besides enormously enhanced intellectual powers we possess two new senses. The one enables us to apprehend radiation of wave-lengths between 100 and 1200 metres, and thus places every individual at all moments of life, both asleep and awake, under the influence of the voice of the community. It is difficult to see how else we could have achieved as complete a solidarity as has been possible. We can never close our consciousness to those wave-lengths on which we are told of our nature as components of a super-organism or deity, possibly the only one in space-time, and of its past, present, and future. It appears that on earth the psychological equivalent of what is transmitted on these wave-lengths included the higher forms of art, music, and literature, the individual moral consciousness, and, in the early days of mankind, religion and patriotism. The other wave-lengths inform us of matters which are not the concern of all at all times, and we can shut them out if we so desire. Their function is not essentially different from that of instrumental radio-communication on earth. The new magnetic sense is of less importance, but is of value in flying and otherwise in view of the very opaque character of our atmosphere. It would have been almost superfluous on earth. We have also recovered the pain sense, which had become vestigial on earth, but is of value for the survival of the individual under adverse circumstances, and hence to the race. So rapid was our evolution that the crew of the last projectile to reach Venus were incapable of fertile unions with our inhabitants, and they were therefore used for experimental purposes.

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  For one of the essential elements of religion is an emotional attitude towards the universe as a whole. As we come to realize the tiny scale, both temporal and spatial, of the older mythologies, and the unimaginable vastness of the possibilities of time and space, we must attempt to conjecture what purposes may be developed in the universe that we are beginning to apprehend. Our private, national, and even international aims are restricted to a time measured in human life-spans.

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  I do not see how any one who has accepted the view of the universe presented by astronomy and geology can suppose that its main purpose is the preparation of a certain percentage of human souls for so much of perfection and happiness as is possible for them. This may be one of its purposes, but it can hardly be the most important. Events are taking place ‘for other great and glorious ends’ which we can only dimly conjecture. Professor Alexander, for example, in _Space, Time, and Deity_, suggests that the end towards which ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth’ is the emergence of a new kind of being which will bear the same relation to mind as do mind to life and life to matter. It is the urge towards this which finds its expression in the higher forms of religion. Without necessarily accepting such a view, one can express some of its implications in a myth. The numerical side of the myth is, I believe, correct, though whether tidal power could be utilized to the extent that I have suggested is a question for the engineers of the future.

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• Shaw and Bergson — the Life Force (now held: Man and Superman, 1903, with its Revolutionist’s Handbook; Back to Methuselah, 1921, with its preface; Bergson’s Creative Evolution, 1907, in Mitchell’s 1911 translation): the era’s other cosmic religion-without-revelation, and the one Stapledon had been answering in print since before the lecture. The documentation is his own, at three dates. The 1918 letter from the Front ranks Nietzsche, Bergson, Comte, Shelley and others as men who “all seem to contribute some definite idea that is gradually proving essential to the new faith”; the c. 1928 essay names the movement’s two moods in a sentence that already contains the lecture’s whole cast — moral zeal directing itself “now in worship of a Life Force, now in loyalty to the awakening consciousness of man himself”; and Philosophy and Living expounds Bergson by name (“Behind evolution there must be some ‘élan vital’ or Life Force, making ever new experiments”) and dismisses him in the sheets’ own key (“some of Bergson’s arguments are far from convincing”). The independence-of-ethics answer the 1946 platform compresses (“If there is a Life Force — it is subject to our moral judgement”) had likewise been in print since 1939: “‘Good’ is not good because it is the goal of evolution; rather evolution is good (if it really is good) because its goal is something which we recognise as good.” What the held books add is the target’s own words at both poles. Bergson’s God is pure becoming — “God thus defined, has nothing of the already made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom” — his superman retrospective rather than awaited (“a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way”), his ending a charge, “the whole of humanity, in space and in time… one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death” — where the lecture ends saluting what may destroy the charger. Shaw states the religion-claim outright — “Creative Evolution is already a religion, and is indeed now unmistakeably the religion of the twentieth century” — and Man and Superman derives value from the Force itself (Don Juan’s “the working within me of Life’s incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding”), the derivation the independence-of-ethics claim severs; the same play even stages the humanist’s case of sheets 16–20 from the other side, in the Devil’s warning: “Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human” — Shaw’s Juan embraces the contempt; the lecture’s double loyalty refuses it. (Tiering: the reading of Shaw and Bergson is documented in Stapledon’s own print and letters as above; that the 1934 sheets themselves aim at these two books remains this analysis’s inference — the sheets name neither man.)
  Letters (1913–19) ↗ · ¶ 316 — quoted passage in context

  […] “holy” pair that are always soaking wet. Consequently it is a very long time since one had dry feet in the daytime. All these tragedies are nothing compared with the real tragedies of the world today, but all the same they are amazing. . . . Another Day. ... I have been reading Nietzsche’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” but in translation. It is annoyingly pompous, and its ideal is ludicrously egotistical; but it has brilliant truths in it here and there, and of course it is interesting to read what the Germans so often profess as their ideal, and to see how far they have really drifted from pure Nietzsche. It is a book to make one think, even if the thinking is often hostile to the author’s idea. And it is wonderful to see how all these great and so different books & men, like Nietzsche, Bergson, Mazzini, Meredith, Morris, Comte, Shelley, Swinburne, Browning, and even Carlyle—all seem to contribute some definite idea that is gradually proving essential to the new faith. It is like a game of patience—fitting in the cards in their right places. And in each case there seems to be so much that will not stand the test, that is not the real true truth, and just one brilliant idea that has been waited for by a puzzled world. . . . As to Conscription, dear, you know what I think, & think with ever surer confidence. You know what I think about the results of the Referendum. And you know how glad I am to think of your acting according to your own conviction in the matter, however profoundly we differ. Look! I feel very strongly about that subject, & in the future I may have to act on that feeling; yet somehow I love you better for being in the enemy’s camp. Lair, noble, and misguided enemy. Certainly one or other of us is misguided, and naturally I won’t believe it is I! I’ll snatch you from that false allegiance someday, or be convinced and convicted […]

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  rare pieces (1908–49) ↗ · ¶ 60 — quoted passage in context

  The movement of moral zeal, then, which directs itself now in worship of a Life Force, now in loyalty to the awakening consciousness of man himself, has many sources and many expressions; and sometimes it has seemed to promise a widespread though new-fangled "religious revival." Indeed for many persons it is in fact to-day a living religion. But it is not distinctive of the modern spirit, and its original minds belong to yesterday rather than to-day. Not that it is outworn; on the contrary it should make an extremely important contribution to the culture of to-morrow. Shame to us if we evade that whole- hearted obligation to the advancement of mentality on this planet. But there is also another and more difficult lesson to learn, a lesson which in our day at least, it is seldom possible to grasp at all save through complete disillusion from all our most cherished ends.

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  Philosophy and Living II (1939) ↗ · ¶ 572 · ¶ 589 — quoted passages in context

  Something positive, Bergson thinks, is needed to explain the continued advance of life. Behind evolution there must be some "*élan vital*" or Life Force, making ever new experiments.

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  But, as we have seen, some of Bergson's arguments are far from convincing; and his theories are unsatisfactory. In particular they are open to the charge that they defeat themselves. They claim to prove that intellect is in principle a false guide, save in practical matters; but since they themselves are based on intellectual processes, their own conclusions must be invalid. The sweeping condemnation of intellect and praise of intuition, though a healthy reaction from crude intellectualism, is itself crude. As we have seen, intellect and intuition involve one another. Intellect itself moves by intuitive leaps, and intuition is often the outcome of preparatory intellectual work.

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  Philosophy and Living I (1939) ↗ · ¶ 669 — quoted passage in context

  Such considerations are not really relevant to the truth or falsity of the theory. What matters is rather that we know very little of the causes and direction of evolution; while good and bad are experienced every day in our own lives. It is certainly arguable that what is intrinsically good is richness and depth of experience and fullness of creative living (if I may be pardoned a very vague phrase). It is true also that in some cases evolution has moved in that direction. It is even possible that there *is* some sort of bias in this direction in the universe. But to derive our moral experience from that bias is to derive the known from the unknown and problematical. "Good" is not good *because* it is the goal of evolution; rather evolution is good (if it really is good) because its goal is something which we recognise as good.

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  Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911) ↗ · ¶ 457 · ¶ 475 · ¶ 479 — quoted passages in context

  […] which is unmaking itself, and that the unforeseen forms which life cuts out in it, forms capable of being themselves prolonged into unforeseen movements, represent the action that is making itself. Now, I have every reason to believe that the other worlds are analogous to ours, that things happen there in the same way. And I know they were not all constructed at the same time, since observation shows me, even to-day, nebulae in course of concentration. Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether it is that which is unmaking itself or whether it is that which is striving to remake itself, I simply express this probable similitude when I speak of a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks display--provided, however, that I do not present this centre as a _thing_, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined, has nothing of the already made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely. That new things can join things already existing is absurd, no doubt, since the _thing_ results from a solidification performed by our understanding, and there are never any things other than those that the understanding has thus constituted. To speak of things creating themselves would therefore amount to saying that the understanding presents to itself more than it presents to itself--a self-contradictory affirmation, an empty and vain idea. But that action increases as it goes on, that it creates in the measure of its advance, is what each of us finds when he watches himself act. Things are constituted by the instantaneous cut which the understanding practices, at a given moment, on a flux of this kind, and what is mysterious when we compare the cuts together becomes clear when we relate them […]

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  From our point of view, life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on its way. Man, then, continues the vital movement indefinitely, although he does not draw along with him all that life carries in itself. On other lines of evolution there have traveled other tendencies which life implied, and of which, since everything interpenetrates, man has, doubtless, kept something, but of which he has kept only very little. _It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will_, man _or_ superman, _had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way_. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and above the accidents of evolution.

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  […] intellect in intuition, many difficulties vanish or become light. But such a doctrine does not only facilitate speculation; it gives us also more power to act and to live. For, with it, we feel ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates. As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

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  Shaw, Back to Methuselah (1921) ↗ · ¶ 148 — quoted passage in context

  Creative Evolution is already a religion, and is indeed now unmistakeably the religion of the twentieth century, newly arisen from the ashes of pseudo-Christianity, of mere scepticism, and of the soulless affirmations and blind negations of the Mechanists and Neo-Darwinians. But it cannot become a popular religion until it has its legends, its parables, its miracles. And when I say popular I do not mean apprehensible by villagers only. I mean apprehensible by Cabinet Ministers as well. It is unreasonable to look to the professional politician and administrator for light and leading in religion. He is neither a philosopher nor a prophet: if he were, he would be philosophizing and prophesying, and not neglecting both for the drudgery of practical government. Socrates and Coleridge did not remain soldiers, nor could John Stuart Mill remain the representative of Westminster in the House of Commons even when he was willing. The Westminster electors admired Mill for telling them that much of the difficulty of dealing with them arose from their being inveterate liars. But they would not vote a second time for the man who was not afraid to break the crust of mendacity on which they were all dancing; for it seemed to them that there was a volcanic abyss beneath, not having his philosophic conviction that the truth is the solidest standing ground in the end. Your front bench man will always be an exploiter of the popular religion or irreligion. Not being an expert, he must take it as he finds it; and before he can take it, he must have been told stories about it in his childhood and had before him all his life an elaborate iconography of it produced by writers, painters, sculptors, temple architects, and artists of all the higher sorts. Even if, as sometimes happens, he is a bit of an amateur in metaphysics as well as a professional politician, he must still govern according to the popular iconography, and not according to his own personal interpretations if these happen to be heterodox.

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  Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) ↗ · ¶ 1324 · ¶ 1360 — quoted passages in context

  DON JUAN. On the contrary, here I have everything that disappointed me without anything that I have not already tried and found wanting. I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life's incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding. It was the supremacy of this purpose that reduced love for me to the mere pleasure of a moment, art for me to the mere schooling of my faculties, religion for me to a mere excuse for laziness, since it had set up a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved. I tell you that in the pursuit of my own pleasure, my own health, my own fortune, I have never known happiness. It was not love for Woman that delivered me into her hands: it was fatigue, exhaustion. When I was a child, and bruised my head against a stone, I ran to the nearest woman and cried away my pain against her apron. When I grew up, and bruised my soul against the brutalities and stupidities with which I had to strive, I did again just what I had done as a child. I have enjoyed, too, my rests, my recuperations, my breathing times, my very prostrations after strife; but rather would I be dragged through all the circles of the foolish Italian's Inferno than through the pleasures of Europe. That is what has made this place of eternal pleasures so deadly to me. It is the absence of this instinct in you that makes you that strange monster called a Devil. It is the success with which you have diverted the attention of men from their real purpose, which in one degree or another is the same as mine, to yours, that has earned you the name of The Tempter. It is the fact that they are doing your will, or rather drifting with your want of will, instead of doing their own, that makes them the uncomfortable, false, restless, artificial, petulant, wretched creatures they are.

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  THE DEVIL. Ay, Rembrandt. There a something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Senor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.

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• Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–85; now held in Common’s translation) — the superman the title’s word must be measured against, and a documented read-and-rejected-in-part rather than an influence. At the Western Front in January 1918 he told Agnes: “I have been reading Nietzsche’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra,’ but in translation. It is annoyingly pompous, and its ideal is ludicrously egotistical; but it has brilliant truths in it here and there… It is a book to make one think, even if the thinking is often hostile to the author’s idea.” (The biography’s summary hardens this into flat hostility; the letter itself is a sifting verdict, and its very next sentence is the Bergson-list quoted above — Nietzsche filed among the contributors of “some definite idea,” his ideal refused.) The comparison the title forces is clean at every joint: Zarathustra’s Superman is future, earthly, and ours to make — “The Superman is the meaning of the earth”; “REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes”; man “a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman,” his best work to “transform yourselves” “into fathers and forefathers of the Superman”; the gods are dead precisely so that the Superman may live. The 1934 Other is none of these — present rather than bred, encountered rather than made, and worshipped, the very posture Zarathustra calls poisoning. What the two positions genuinely share — man transitional, consolation refused — is exactly the sheets’ margin (“transitional & scarcely a beginning”) and no more: the sheets never name Nietzsche, and the one documented contact is the 1918 sifting.
  Letters (1913–19) ↗ · ¶ 316 — quoted passage in context

  […] promise to part of the invisible portions, in cold water outside. But in hard frost even that gets omitted, & people wait for a change of wind and wipe their faces every morning on a damp towel. My personal sorrow at present is connected with boots. I have two pairs, one of trench boots & one ordinary. The ordinary ones are old and dilapidated; the “trenchers” suddenly began to fall to pieces, and as the divisional bootmaker says he is too busy to mend them I had to send them to a town, where they will be probably a month. Meanwhile I have one “holy” pair that are always soaking wet. Consequently it is a very long time since one had dry feet in the daytime. All these tragedies are nothing compared with the real tragedies of the world today, but all the same they are amazing. . . . Another Day. ... I have been reading Nietzsche’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” but in translation. It is annoyingly pompous, and its ideal is ludicrously egotistical; but it has brilliant truths in it here and there, and of course it is interesting to read what the Germans so often profess as their ideal, and to see how far they have really drifted from pure Nietzsche. It is a book to make one think, even if the thinking is often hostile to the author’s idea. And it is wonderful to see how all these great and so different books & men, like Nietzsche, Bergson, Mazzini, Meredith, Morris, Comte, Shelley, Swinburne, Browning, and even Carlyle—all seem to contribute some definite idea that is gradually proving essential to the new faith. It is like a game of patience—fitting in the cards in their right places. And in each case there seems to be so much that will not stand the test, that is not the real true truth, and just one brilliant idea that has been waited for by a puzzled world. . . . As to Conscription, […]

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  the held text is uncorrected OCR of the print edition, which often confuses c and e (“ehureh” for “church”); the excerpt is shown exactly as held.
  Nietzsche, Zarathustra (Common trans.) ↗ · ¶ 183 · ¶ 184 · ¶ 205 · ¶ 1051 · ¶ 1004 — quoted passages in context

  The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman SHALL BE the meaning of the earth!

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  I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not.

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  Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.

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  Not perhaps ye yourselves, my brethren! But into fathers and forefathers of the Superman could ye transform yourselves: and let that be your best creating!—

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  “DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW DO WE DESIRE THE SUPERMAN TO LIVE.”—Let this be our final will at the great noontide!—

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• Julian Huxley, Religion Without Revelation (1927; now held) — the era’s flagship attempt to build a religion of humanism on evolutionary foundations, and the position the 1946 notes name (“Evolutionary Humanism — cp. Julian Huxley”; the label is the later Huxley’s own — though by August 1946 the biography reports it among Stapledon’s own platform formulas at the Exeter Present Question Conference, a witness the 1946 monograph weighs at its value). Held whole, the book turns out to be not the lecture’s opposite but its rival twin — which sharpens the calibration claim considerably. Huxley too rejects revelation, doctrine and a personal God; quotes Otto’s mysterium-tremendum page at length (§2.6(b)); insists the sense of the sacred “may be vouchsafed in many ways and in many objects”; runs the lecture’s capacity-spectrum argument (the pioneering few, the responsive many, the value-blind); and even makes the sheets’ Wordsworthian point about maturation, Wordsworth cited, the disciplined sense finding its objects “more and more in the familiar.” The clash is confined to two points, and they are the lecture’s two hinges. First, the location of the holy: for Huxley things come within religion’s ambit “in so far as they are touched with sanctity by the mind” — sanctity “is imparted to them by the human beings who have felt them as sacred” — where sheet 23 insists on numinous significance “in objective existence.” Second, the ground: Huxley’s frame is biological through and through — “the problem of religion, is itself a biological problem. Man is an organism”; his religion of the future rests “on the basis of a scientific humanism” and crowns “conscious control by man of his own nature and racial destiny.” The 1946 verdict — error, “founding ethics on biology”; value, “using biology to clarify” ethics — fits this book, though it fits the later Huxley’s explicitly “evolutionary humanist” essays more exactly, and whether the 1934 lecture answers this book specifically the notes cannot show. What the held text does show is that the lecture’s second half reads as a point-by-point reply to the position the book made famous — keep religion, lose the doctrine, and locate the holy in man’s response and man’s future rather than in the Other. Where the analysis previously called it “the unnamed alternative the whole lecture is calibrated against,” the calibration now looks finer: not humanism versus superhumanism, but two rival religions-without-revelation divided over whether the sacred is conferred or found. A 1957 postscript completes the record. When the later Huxley needed “a name for this new belief,” he coined the modern word: “Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” The essay (held in excerpt) shows the coinage’s content is not the upgrade eschatology the word later attached to but the fulfilment-of-capacity program itself — “the fullest realization of man’s possibilities, whether by the individual, by the community, or by the species,” man “appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution” — evolutionary humanism under a new flag. Which sharpens the historical irony the project’s blog notes: the word now used for engineered self-transcendence was minted for precisely the position — man as the sole agent and sole beneficiary of transcendence, “man remaining man” — that the 1934 lecture judged necessary but not enough, and the 1946 lecture named and filed (“Evolutionary Humanism — cp. Julian Huxley”). The canonization is now held at both ends: when the modern movement wrote its own history — Bostrom’s “A History of Transhumanist Thought” (2005; held in excerpt) — it was this passage it quoted as the word’s origin, the 1957 sentence reproduced verbatim (“man remaining man, but transcending himself”), in the same history whose post-Daedalus genealogy lists “the works of Olaf Stapledon, a philosopher and science fiction author.”
  Huxley, Religion Without Revelation (1927) ↗ · ¶ 841 · ¶ 360 · ¶ 366 · ¶ 363 · ¶ 124 · ¶ 906 · ¶ 14 · ¶ 837 — quoted passages in context

  Nor must it be narrow-minded, but it must admit that this same high sense of sacredness and transcendent value may be vouchsafed in many ways and in many objects. Some may find it in poetry. Shelley was an avowed atheist and a hater of Christianity, but he was obviously of religious temperament. This could hardly be claimed of Keats, but to him beauty was certainly a sacrament. It may come through art or music; it may be vouchsafed through love. It may be found in the pursuit of pure truth—think of Lucretius, Galileo, Pasteur, Thomas Huxley. It may be found in the practice of a life devoted to the service of humanity's suffering, as with Father Damien, or Mrs Elizabeth Fry, or Dr Schweizer. Still others, like Richard Jefferies or Wordsworth or Thoreau, may find it in the solitudes of Nature; or, again, like born patriots, in a sanctification of their country.

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  We may put it in this way. The normal man has an innate capacity for experiencing sanctity in certain events, just as (on a lower and more determinate plane) he has for experiencing red or blue, fear or disgust or desire, or as he has for experiencing beauty, or the validity of logical proof, or for feeling love or hate, or judging good and evil. Some have this in an overmastering degree, and will be haunted all their days by their experiences of holiness and the felt need of conforming their life to them. The majority, on the other hand, have it much less intensely. They will, in their degree, understand holiness when it is pointed out to them, but be incapable of the pioneering discoveries or the power of expression of the exceptional few. These few are like the few creators in the world of poetry or music, the rest are like those who can and do respond to the creation of the poets and musicians and value it, while themselves remaining dumb. Finally, there are undoubtedly some who, either congenitally or through their upbringing, are wholly unable to appreciate what is meant by the sacred or the holy, just as there are a few men who are incapable of appreciating music, a few who are born with defect of the retina leading to colour-blindness, a few who are born imbecile, unable to follow a logical chain of reasoning, a few born moral imbeciles, incapable of appreciating what is meant by right or wrong, and many more in whom upbringing or their own mode of life has deadened or wholly distorted this moral sense.

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  Another characteristic of the sense of mystery in the disciplined mind is that it tends to find its objects more and more in the familiar, less in the merely unusual. This, too, has its parallel in art. It is only a temporary and uncompleted phase of art which gives us programme-music, subject-pictures, the purely narrative poem or story, the building which is striking at all costs. The great artist can make a kitchen table contain more beauty and meaning than a second-rate hand can infuse into a picture of the greatest event in history ; and the finest works of art deal often with the simplest and most familiar human verities.

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  Thus the powers that are behind Nature ; the mysteries that confront the inquiring mind ; the great moments of man, his birth, his marriage, and his death ; the revelations of art and knowledge ; the moral ideal and the practice of good—all these and many others may be objects of religion, but are not so of necessity. They only come within the ambit of religion in so far as they are touched with sanctity by the mind, in so far as they are thought of and felt as sacred.

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  Once it is realised that the sanctity that inheres in places or buildings, in ritual or ceremonial, is imparted to them by the human beings who have felt them as sacred, then no-one of religious inclinations will be debarred by credal difficulties or what he regards as dogmatic absurdities from participating in worship. For worship itself will be seen to be not a bowing down before a spiritual idol with supernatural powers, nor a placation of a jealous God, nor organised celebrations and praise in honour of a beloved ruler. It is an opportunity for a communal proclaiming of belief in certain spiritual values; for refreshment of the spirit through that meditation guided by pure desires which alone deserves the name of prayer, and through the sense of contact with spiritual mysteries which disappear or are not thought of in the rush of practical life; for expressing in music or liturgy various natural religious emotions of praise, contrition, awe, aspiration, which otherwise would remain without natural outlet. Creeds are necessary if one is to have an organised church at all ; but far too much stress has been laid by religious bodies on confessions of intellectual faith. With the acceptance of the view here maintained, creeds would automatically have to be adjusted to the new outlook. The test of formal membership of a particular religious organisation would still reside in the acceptance of particular beliefs and ideas ; but these different schemes of thought would be all particular aspects of a more general scheme, and matters would be so arranged that intellectual barriers, in the form of creeds and dogma, should no more prevent a religiously minded man from worship in a church not of his own sect than that a lover of art should be compelled to make a profession of belief in impressionism or cubism or pre-Raphaelitism before being allowed to enjoy an exhibition of pictures.

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  The destructive criticism which I have been offering in a good part of this book has, however, been no more deliberately or solely destructive than is a mother's insistence upon her growing boy relinquishing, say, the habit of sucking his thumb—a habit not only pleasurable but in an earlier stage natural and reasonable enough—no more so than the efforts of a teacher to rid his pupils, when they are of an age to profit by the strong meat of thought, from the inevitably naive views of childhood and of uninstructed everyday, to the truer and more satisfying conclusions of organised science and philosophy. Let me illuminate my meaning from biology—and this not merely because it happens to be my own science, but because the whole problem with which this book is attempting to deal, the problem of religion, is itself a biological problem. Man is an organism—a peculiar and indeed in several respects a unique organism, but an organism no less; as such he is limited by his material construction, tight-bound to his environment in bonds of inherited relation, voyaging from strange past to unknown future on an evolutionary sea.

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  I know I shall be attacked, but I hope that I shall find support, not necessarily in detail, but as regards general attitude : industrialism, education, science, and communications, topped by the War, have brought the forces of change to a head, and the time is ripe. The moment does indeed seem to be approaching when man can and should begin constructing a new common outlook, a new habitation for his spirit, new from the foundations up, on the basis of a scientific humanism. The eighteenth century attempted it, but failed. Reason was not enough; more of brute fact and fact's control was needed. Nor was it enough that Reason should shine in the few; education and social reconstruction were also necessary, and so the age of Reason gave way, through wars and revolutions, to the age of Science and Industry.

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  The same, *mutatis mutandis*, is true for our control of Nature. For a society founded on tradition, where discoveries were made only by accident, alteration was gradual and unconscious, stability seemed natural and man’s main concern to make the best of what was inevitably given. The application of scientific knowledge has produced a very different outlook. Civilised man is beginning to realise that he can, if he so wishes, in large measure model the world in accordance with his desires. He has for some time realised this pretty thoroughly with regard to inorganic nature, and has now reached the same point in his outlook on organic nature other than himself—noxious insects and parasites, tropical diseases, afforestation, agriculture, fisheries. He is beginning to see its full implications in regard to social development--witness the recent outburst of activity in promoting town-planning, nature reserves, and the conservation of wild life, in preserving beautiful buildings from destruction, in saving the country-side from vandalism, in national education, in the concerted appeal for playing-fields for poor children, and in a hundred other ways. Finally, there is the extension of the same outlook to his own nature. That has hardly as yet got a foothold ; but it is coming. This will bring profound changes of practice. Psychology and education between them are revealing what can be done in helping the individual to control himself ; the study of heredity and population-growth, and the knowledge of eugenics and of birth-control are pointing the way to wholly new aims—to a conscious control by man of his own nature and racial destiny. Medicine is ousting the idea, common to all primitive societies, and accepted by all early religions, that disease is due to supernatural causes, whether magic or the will of a god, and pointing the way to man’s achievement of health. How can the twentieth century, grounded in *this* outlook, which is not only *actually* but *inevitably* new, be content with the same religious outlook which satisfied it when the natural world was uncomprehended, appeared chaotic as much as orderly, and the ideas of control and conscious change had not yet been born ?

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  Huxley, “Transhumanism” (1957) ↗ · ¶ 17 · ¶ 7 · ¶ 6 — quoted passages in context

  The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps *transhumanism* will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.

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  What the job really boils down to is this—the fullest realization of man’s possibilities, whether by the individual, by the community, or by the species in its processional adventure along the corridors of time.

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  It is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution—appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What is more, he can’t refuse the job. Whether he wants to or not, whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth. That is his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned.

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  Bostrom, “History of Transhumanist Thought” (2005) ↗ · ¶ 32 · ¶ 26 — quoted passages in context

  The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself – not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way – but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. 17

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  Haldane’s essay became a bestseller and set off a chain of future‐oriented discussions, including The World, the Flesh and the Devil, by J. D. Bernal (1929) 12 , which speculated about space colonization and bionic implants as well as mental improvements arising from advanced social science and psychology; the works of Olaf Stapledon, a philosopher and science fiction author; and the essay “Icarus: the Future of Science” (1924) by Bertrand Russell. 13 Russell took a more pessimistic view, arguing that without more kindliness in the world, technological power would mainly serve to increase our ability to harm one another. Science fiction authors such as H. G. Wells and Stapledon got many people thinking about the future evolution of the human race.

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• Gerald Heard — the “evolution of consciousness” theorist whom Philosophy and Living credits and corrects by name (the full comparison is at §3.7). The project now holds both ends of the record: the 1929 Ascent of Humanity itself — the one P&L’s reading list names, acquired August 2026 after two scans supplied under its title proved to be the trilogy’s 1935 third book — and that third book, The Source of Civilization (1935; in copyright, excerpted publicly), whose preface restates the 1929 thesis in Heard’s own retrospective words. Heard’s group-consciousness metaphysics is precisely what Stapledon strips out; his developmental psychology of social awareness is what Stapledon keeps. And the strip-out is not this analysis’s inference alone: the biography preserves Stapledon’s own contemporary verdict on the 1929 Ascent. The narrative has him reading it during Last and First Men’s gestation but finding “its notions of psychological evolution unreliable,” and the endnote quotes his letter to Mitchison of January 1931: the book was “helpful, though there is much in it that seems to me unjustified. I feel very doubtful about his theory of ‘co-consciousness,’ and about spiritualism.” With the 1929 text on the shelf, the letter’s two doubts resolve into its two speculative poles — chapter I’s telepathic prehistory and the closing chapters’ psychic-research future (mediumship read as evidence of “a field of consciousness which is impersonal”) — and the future half, which the 1935 stand-in could not show, turns out to run nearest the fiction and farthest from the lecture: ahead of individuality “lies a new consciousness combining the peace of the co-conscious with the intensity of personality” — as close a formula for Last Men in London’s racial mind as the period offers (comparison-tier; the reading is documented, the debt is not) — but its price is the lecture’s floor (“the last and worst enemy is individuality”) and its mood the consolation the lecture refuses (“If that was Eden, a step ahead of us is Paradise”): a superhuman that is more-of-us, one step on, where the 1934 Other is present, alien, and no continuation of anybody. The reservation Philosophy and Living printed in 1939 was in his correspondence eight years earlier — influence accepted, metaphysics declined, from the start.
  Crossley, Speaking for the Future (1994) ↗ · ¶ 808 · ¶ 2096 — quoted passages in context

  More recent works also made an impact. In 1923, Stapledon read Wells's *Outline of History* and in 1927 J. W. Dunne's *Experiment in Time*, the first a model of synoptic and generalizing history and the second an investigation of telepathy that challenged the commonsense metaphor of time's arrow. He also read Gerald Heard's *Ascent of Humanity*, but found its notions of psychological evolution unreliable. An essay acquired in 1928, during the early phase of *Last and First Men*'s composition, had a far greater impact on the decision to extend the book beyond the relatively modest confines of the outline in “The Future Speaks”: J. B. S. Haldane's “The Last Judgment.” Haldane's speculative apocalypse is a cornucopia of unelaborated but provocative guesses and fancies about the future, around many of which Olaf built entire episodes—the depletion of fossil fuels and the destruction of the earth by its disintegrating moon, the development of new human senses and the abolition of pain through eugenic manipulation, the terraforming of Venus and the fashioning of a stumpy dwarf humanity to colonize Jupiter.[24]

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  24. "The Last Judgment" appeared in Haldane's *Possible Worlds* (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927); OS's copy (SA) was the 1928 printing. Sam Moskowitz discusses its relevance to *LFM* in "Olaf Stapledon: The Man Behind the Works" in *FFC*, 35-37. Of *The Ascent of Humanity* (1929), OS told Naomi Mitchison it was "helpful, though there is much in it that seems to me unjustified. I feel very doubtful about his theory of 'co-consciousness,' and about spiritualism" (20 Jan. 1931; NLS). In *PL*, vol. 2, pp. 457-58, he criticized the presentation of evolution in the *Ascent*.

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  Heard, The Ascent of Humanity (1929) ↗ · ¶ 974 · ¶ 975 · ¶ 1064 · ¶ 1068 — quoted passages in context

  [page 296] of the abnormal, only the morbid can be noticed by the normal. From this point then are to be traced separately the two divisions of this abnormality: medium phenomena (subjective) and phenomena of hauntings (objective). In the first we can continue to follow the evolution of the medium from proto-individualism and see that, as she develops, her anthropomorphism modifies (case of Mrs. Piper). This abandonment of anthropomorphism and the establishment of telepathy reveal that there exists a field of consciousness which is impersonal. Further, Psychometry suggests that that field is not necessarily attached to living persons, and Cryptaesthesia, that the field may extend very widely in space and time. So we pass outside the strict limits of the medium side of Psychical Research. Between this "subjective" side and the "objective" side, of hauntings, this middle term of Cryptaesthesia lies. The *Gate of Remembrance* is an example of this. So we pass to hauntings. They, if at all true, would seem to support personal survival. But they in fact are liable to more serious anthropomorphic distortion by the onlooker than even mediums' phenomena. What was a mood is taken for a person, not merely by the misconception of the experient but by his power of creative unconscious suggestion. The Doris case is an illustration of this; here a "mood" was transformed into a "person." The trace or echo theory of hauntings is right, if not considered final. The trace or echo is a path, a final and distorted vibration, from a field which we can only be aware of in distortion. Ceasing to be anthropomorphic we should be able to be aware of the field in its normal areas, i.e., of super-personality. This the nature of all present known hauntings confirms, for all are expressions of the self-regarding passions. We have, then, from the abnormal, knowledge of a lower condition of unindividualized passions. We may assume an upper layer for the other-regarding passions where, *a fortiori*, individuality would be transcended. So from Psychical Research and de-

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  ductions from it we find confirmation that individuality is but a boundary belt through which man is passing and that ahead lies a new consciousness combining the peace of the co-conscious with the intensity of personality.

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  [page 324] shrinks from all outside the narrow focus of personal desire. Above we can detect the greater trinity of force which breaks the individual out of his cerement, the trinity of the "other-regarding" passions: Creativeness, which makes Greed and even possession senseless: Love that renders hatred absurd: Understanding, which leaves Fear meaningless. These will not tolerate isolation, and they deliver the individualized psyche by making it realize that the last and worst enemy is individuality.

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  [page 325] last what was Eden. We have climbed out of the mists, and across the valley, in which lie shrouded all the cities, the kingdoms, and the empires, we look on to the sunlit slopes on which the child-mind plays. Turning back to the position we have won to gain that insight, we see that we, too, are on the threshold of a station, itself as clear and free and open. If that was Eden, a step ahead of us is Paradise.

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  Heard, The Source of Civilization (1935) ↗ · ¶ 57 — quoted passage in context

  In my first speculation — *The Ascent of Humanity* — I thought such a force could only be the relic of an instinct — the persistence of the animal group-consciousness right on into historic times The historical hypothesis then runs as follows that while no doubt the persons at the top of society were self-conscious individuals, the vast mass remained unself-conscious and thus capable of an unquestioning cohesion which was the real social cement, or to use Walter Bagehot's phrase, the binding in 'the cake of custom' I still believe that to be a factor underrated or completely disregarded by historians who never doubted that their own acute self-consciousness was and always had been possessed by every man, civilized or savage Further reflection, however, showed me that this cohesion is not great and in many societies for thousands of years has certainly not by itself been sufficient to prevent social dissolution. It was necessary therefore to look for some conservative force which might have power to appeal to primitive feelings of group loyalty and recreate a less self-conscious and competitive frame of mind among associated men. Religion was inevitably the answer.

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5. What the lecture really argues (interpretive summary)

Strip the scaffolding and the argument is this:

1. Ethics bottoms out in intuition — the felt “I ought,” the seen worthwhileness of developed human capacity. No demonstration is possible or needed.
2. Humanism, taken seriously, self-transcends. Its own best form posits a goal that is good absolutely, not merely because we want it; its own logic makes individuals — and finally Mankind itself — instrumental to something more. The humanist who follows his ideal all the way up finds himself already outside humanism.
3. There is a distinctive experience — the numinous apprehension of the whole — which the reductive arguments dissolve, or spare, exactly as they dissolve or spare the moral intuitions humanism itself rests on. To accept the one and reduce the other (via Freud, via biology) is special pleading. (Parity of vulnerability, note, not proof of veridicality — a limit the notes themselves respect, §2.4.)
4. But the experience licenses no doctrine. Every inference from “I am aware of an unspeakable Beauty” to “therefore God, therefore providence, therefore immortality” is corrupted by the craving for security. The discipline of superhumanism is to stay at the salute — “I can say no more about it, but only about its effects on me.”
5. The test is practice. Genuine worship yields energy plus detachment: fiercer service of the human ideal, unshakable peace when fate defeats it, humility that confers dignity, scepticism that improves thinking. Perverted worship (withdrawal, dogma, persecution, herd-hysteria) is diagnosed and disowned in advance.
6. Man is transitional — “scarcely a beginning — even, But doomed?” — and his true function is to be the universe’s local organ of awareness and praise (a synthesis of sheets 22, 28 and 30 — where the margin’s own answer, “To worship,” is first struck and then restored). This is not misanthropy but the only ground of a dignity that cannot be humiliated by the stars.

The position is genuinely original — it is not theism, not pantheism (Waking World’s same-year verdict groups “The Whole is a living conscious Whole” with the assertions that are “all equally false”), not Russell’s defiant humanism (the free man’s worship is offered “at the shrine that his own hands have built” — §4 sets the two side by side), not Huxley’s religion of conferred sanctity (§4), not mysticism (he explicitly brackets “mystical vision”), and not proto-existentialism (the Other is not absurd; it “may yet be in itself systematic”). The nearest kin are Spinoza’s amor dei intellectualis stripped of Spinoza’s rational necessity — a kinship Stapledon himself acknowledged in Waking World that same year, naming Spinoza (with Jesus and the Buddha) as exemplifying “the union of courageous moral action and ecstatic acceptance, or, as he called it, ‘the intellectual love of God’” — and the “disinterested” religious naturalism later developed by writers he influenced. It is a position for those who are neither Christians nor atheists — the stance he was still performing on an American stage in the last year of his life, in the “concise anti-autobiography” the biography records from Newark, March 1949: “I am not a Communist. I am not a Christian. I am just me.” (Crossley’s source is Moskowitz’s eyewitness narrative; he cautions that “Newark newspapers made no mention of OS’s speech.”) The lecture’s own best name for the position is the larger rationalism. One tension the lecture leaves standing deserves naming: it finds “the superhuman everywhere” while insisting that “all our knowledge of it is mythical” and “I can say no more about it.” A position that lives that close to self-cancellation survives, if it survives, as a practice rather than a proposition — which is what the rest of the shelf (§3.9) shows it becoming.

One standing counter-reading belongs beside this summary, because it is the considered judgment of the biographer who knows the life best. Crossley reads the mature position double: “The agnostic piety Stapledon embraced in his mature years… is both an intricately reasoned proposition and a psychological war wound”; and, “whether considered as philosophy or as autobiography, this calm resignation to, and exultation in, suffering is the single most troubling, and for some readers offensive, motif in his philosophy and fiction.” This analysis has read the lecture as argument; the biography insists it is also symptom — the ambulance orderly’s years among the broken metabolized into an acceptance with doctrine’s shape. The two readings do not exclude one another, and the lecture nearly concedes the second itself (§2.4’s closing caveat: a wish for austere submission may be as wish-laden as a wish for rescue). A reader should hold both.

6. The notes as performance: reading the formatting

For the presentation, it is worth knowing how the manuscript encodes delivery:

• Indentation is argument-structure: each level subordinates to the one above; he could reconstruct full sentences at sight from the hierarchy.
• Single underline = emphasis; double underline = section-level stress or key term (“felt needs,” “Mighty Other,” “must salute”).
• Red pencil = the cover’s staging: the archive-item number and title, the venue and date (“South Place, 29·12·34”), and stray foliation (one red page number survives on sheet 8). The “Naive” softening — inserted above “low-brow” in several places, a decision he took late — is in a paler turquoise, a third medium; the marking crosses (X) are graphite.
• Margins carry the second voice: rejected wordings (a diagonal, struck-through “or worshipful” beside the definition), delivery cues (“Dwell on this”), compressed doctrine (“Advance = finer adjustment to reality,” “man is transitional & scarcely a beginning”), and questions worked over in real time (“Instrumental to — what?” — answered “To worship,” struck, then restored with a double underline).
• The crossed-out block on sheet 16 shows him restructuring in real time: an earlier plan (“First: state the case for humanism as strongly as possible…”) struck through and replaced by the tighter “Defence of Humanism / Defence of Superhumanism” architecture.
• Sheet 22 preserves a single-word revision that is a philosophical act: in “(d) I live better, more humanly, effectively through keeping sensitive to the Superhuman,” the word “effectively” is inserted above the line with a guide mark. (The 72-megapixel archival imagery corrected our earlier reading here: a lower-resolution pass had reported “humanly” struck through, but at full resolution there is no cancellation stroke — the insertion adds to “humanly” rather than replacing it.) The addition still does philosophical work: “more humanly” alone would quietly re-subordinate the argument to humanism, and the superadded “effectively” keeps the pragmatic claim honest and non-circular — but he made the claim broader, not different. He is copy-editing his own metaphysics in pencil, in a later hand.
• Sheets 13, 15, 19 are near-empty section markers — the visible seams of a talk assembled from modular blocks, some sheets renumbered (the double page numbers — “6” over a struck “10,” “12” over a struck “16,” “11” over a struck “15” — record at least one reordering).
• The manuscript carries at least two campaigns of writing. The 72-megapixel archival captures (University of Liverpool Digital Heritage Lab; verified against our transcription sheet by sheet) resolve what the 1.5-megapixel scans could not: the principal text is in a blue-green pencil, while a second pass in ordinary graphite added marginalia (the “pragmatic reason for belief in God, ‘comfort’” notes on sheet 29, previously taken for red pencil, are graphite), reinforced dozens of underlines (many “double” underlines are a teal line with a broader graphite stroke beneath), inserted words (“effectively,” “eerie,” “& Majesty,” “ð superhuman everywhere”), and cross-referencing symbols (⊙, ⊕). The turquoise “Naive” insertions are a third, paler medium; true red pencil is confined to the cover’s staging (the item number and the venue/date) and one stray page number — the working crosses and doctrinal margins, some formerly tagged red in the transcription, are graphite (the tags were corrected against the captures in this edition). In other words, the notes were worked over again after their first writing — the graphite layer is most plausibly preparation for a repeat delivery or for the writing of Waking World — and what the manuscript records is not one evening but a period of thought.
• The high-resolution pass also cleaned the text’s edges: four of the marks we had transcribed as “[illegible]” are not writing at all but binding-tear punch holes with the black imaging backing showing through; two long-disputed readings resolved (“ff” under a cancellation; an overwritten “Obj:-” where we had guessed “e.g.:-“); and roughly 140 micro-corrections (glyph identity ð vs θ, ampersands vs plus signs, exact underline extents, media attributions) were applied to the consensus transcription. No reading bearing on the lecture’s argument changed.

He spoke, in other words, from a living document that had been through multiple performances or revisions — which is precisely why reconstructing the spoken lecture (the project’s next artifact) is legitimate: the notes are dense enough to determine the argument sentence by sentence, and his published prose supplies the voice.

7. A note on method: the Rosetta stone

One lecture in the archive lets us test the whole enterprise of reconstruction empirically. Stapledon’s notes for “Interplanetary Man” (October 1948, British Interplanetary Society) survive alongside his own published text of the address (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 1948). Comparing the two shows exactly how he expanded outline into speech, and it is chastening:

• Compression is extreme and allusive. The note “story about magic carpet!” unpacks to a full self-deprecating conceit (“I feel much as a man might feel who, merely because he once wrote a children’s story about a magic carpet, has undertaken to discourse to a society of aeroplane designers about the future of aviation”) — the note is a private pointer to a joke about himself, not a summary of its content. A reconstructor without the published text would almost certainly guess wrong (ours did, before correction).
  Interplanetary Man? (1948) ↗ · ¶ 2 — quoted passage in context

  I. Introduction IT IS WITH some hesitation that I address this very expert Society. I feel much as a man might feel who, merely because he once wrote a children’s story about a magic carpet, has undertaken to discourse to a society of aeroplane designers about the future of aviation. Contributors to the Journal of this truly epoch-making Society overawe me with their scientific knowledge and their wealth of mathematical formulae! Let me at once put my cards on the table by confessing that my training in science ended when I failed to pass the “London Matric” in what used to be called “organic chemistry,” and that my knowledge of mathematics is far more sketchy even than my knowledge of the sciences. I am a dabbler in many subjects, an expert in none. As such, my only function to-night must be to bring to bear on interplanetary travel light from other fields of knowledge. Modern civilization cannot get along without experts of many kinds. In most fields the day of the amateur is past. But just because this is pre- eminently an age of experts, we have to face the serious danger that the human race may come to consist wholly of experts none of whom understands what his fellows are doing, or why they are doing it, and all of whom are ignorant of the pattern of human life as a whole. Knowledge has become so vast that no single mind can speak with authority save in relation to his own particular corner of it. But such is the prestige of scientific expertism that scientists are apt to make far-reaching pronouncements about matters lying beyond their special competence, for instance about politics, ethics, religion and philosophy. One of the most serious problems of our day is to work out an educational technique which, while producing real

  read in context ↗
• Citations in the notes are real and specific. “(Haldane’s ‘law of nature’)” is not decoration: the published text quotes Haldane’s actual suggestion “that it may be a law of nature that any species that gains atomic power before unifying its world-society must destroy itself” — and then amends it. The notes’ names should be trusted as load-bearing.
  Interplanetary Man? (1948) ↗ · ¶ 3 — quoted passage in context

  experts in each field, will ensure that each one of them will also be a reasonably well informed and responsible democratic citizen. Even when this end has been achieved, it will still be necessary for some people to tackle the work of correlating the various growing points of thought. This is supposed to be the task of philosophers, or of one particular sort of philosophers. They have to learn something from all the main kinds of experts, and to relate the findings in each field to the findings in others. This is indeed a formidable task; and unless these universal intruders combine intelligence with humility, they are likely to make a mess of it, and to be reviled by the experts in every field. It is therefore with a combination of humility and the hardihood that leads fools to rush in where angels fear to tread that I venture to talk to you at all. The only useful thing I can do is to try to show you how, as it seems to me, your bold and highly specialized venture of interplanetary travel fits into the total venture of man in this formidable universe. I start with an assumption amply justified by the Society’s work. I assume that, if all goes well with man, men will, in fact, be able to reach the other planets within a few decades, and able to effect landings on them. This assumption may, of course, turn out to be unjustified. Unexpected difficulties may arise. Or, on the other hand, all may not go well with man. His folly may quite well lead to the destruction of civilization, to the extermination of his species, and even to the extinction of all terrestrial life. It is not entirely fantastic to surmise that he may even blow up his planet, and reduce it to a new swarm of asteroids. In gaining control of atomic energy, man clumsily grasps an instrument of incalculable potency, both for good and for evil. J. B. S. Haldane has suggested that it may be a law of nature that any species that gains atomic power before unifying its world-

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• The expansion ratio is roughly 10–20× (a line of notes becomes a hundred to two hundred words), and the added material is characteristically: concrete figures (“some twenty thousand generations”), homely analogies, courteous self-positioning, and staged enumerations (“There seem to be three possible futures for man: (1)…”).
  Interplanetary Man? (1948) ↗ · ¶ 4 · ¶ 5 — quoted passages in context

  society must destroy itself. I should myself say, not merely “before it unifies its world-society,” but “before it disciplines itself to the true values.” Probably there has never before, in the whole career of our species, been so momentous a crisis, as that of our day. Our own human species is said to have begun, about a quarter to half a million years ago. For most of this period the river of human life has wandered sluggishly through the plains of time. If we consider the average length of a human generation over this period to be about twenty-five years, then some twenty thousand generations have passed since Homo Sapiens began. During almost the whole of that vast period (perhaps a four-thousandth part of the aeon that has passed since the earth’s formation) men had little power, and change in human affairs was very slight. Tribes, no doubt, rose and fell. Improvements in technique were rarely discovered; and discovered only to be lost again, and re-discovered ages afterwards. Conditions in a man’s childhood were generally much the same as conditions in his old age. But at last this slow and tortuous advance in the techniques of production achieved agriculture, and later the building of cities, the founding of civilization. This seems to have occurred some six thousand years ago, or a little over two hundred and forty generations. The river of human life accelerated somewhat, tumbling forward in rapids. Power and leisure and comfort increased; but almost always only for the few. The masses seem to have been more and more deeply enslaved. Not till almost the end of this six thousand years, say three hundred years ago or about twelve generations, did modern science begin to take effect on human life. Thus man has used science only during the last thousandth part of his whole career, and his career is the last four-thousandth of the period since the earth was formed. In our own day, man is snatching at atomic power. We are the first generation of the atomic age. Change is already far more rapid than ever

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  before, and will soon become catastrophic, for good or ill. The river of human life has reached a precipice. The cataract plunges — whither? It is quite possible that we may be the last of all human generations. Yet, barring accidents, the earth should be habitable for a period as long as it has yet existed, say two thousand million years, or some eighty million of our present human generations. There seem to be three possible futures for man: (1) actual and speedy annihilation; (2) the creation of a world-wide totalitarian ant-state, based on atomic power and the reduction of all human individuals to robots; (3) the founding of a new kind of human world, in which the Aladdin’s lamp of science will be used wisely, instead of being abandoned to that blend of short-sighted stupidity and downright power-lust that has played so tragic a part in the application of science thus far. It is a platitude that man has gained power without wisdom. If he does not at the eleventh hour, or half a minute before zero hour, become just a little less silly, his doom is sealed. On the other hand, given a modicum of wisdom, we shall be able greatly to raise the conditions of life for all human beings, no matter what their colour, and to afford to every one of them the chance to develop and express such capacity as he has for truly human living and truly human work in the great common enterprise of man. What that enterprise is or should be, I shall consider later. This possibility of affording to all men full opportunity is now no merely Utopian dream. Its progressive attainment is at last physically possible. Nothing now stands in the way but the ignorance, the stupidity and the evil will of men. And let me say at once, though I shall later enlarge on this point, that the promise is not simply one of increased luxury and hoggish ease. Rather it is a promise of a deepening and enriching of human experience. Man’s present condition of constant frustration and torment and

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• His platform voice is plainer than his literary voice: unembarrassed stock phrases (“Let me at once put my cards on the table” — the address’s own opening move), direct concessions (“We have to admit that it is indeed strange” — Waking World), and the summary shrug that recurs across his popular prose: “Well, there it is.”
  Interplanetary Man? (1948) ↗ · ¶ 2 — quoted passage in context

  I. Introduction IT IS WITH some hesitation that I address this very expert Society. I feel much as a man might feel who, merely because he once wrote a children’s story about a magic carpet, has undertaken to discourse to a society of aeroplane designers about the future of aviation. Contributors to the Journal of this truly epoch-making Society overawe me with their scientific knowledge and their wealth of mathematical formulae! Let me at once put my cards on the table by confessing that my training in science ended when I failed to pass the “London Matric” in what used to be called “organic chemistry,” and that my knowledge of mathematics is far more sketchy even than my knowledge of the sciences. I am a dabbler in many subjects, an expert in none. As such, my only function to-night must be to bring to bear on interplanetary travel light from other fields of knowledge. Modern civilization cannot get along without experts of many kinds. In most fields the day of the amateur is past. But just because this is pre- eminently an age of experts, we have to face the serious danger that the human race may come to consist wholly of experts none of whom understands what his fellows are doing, or why they are doing it, and all of whom are ignorant of the pattern of human life as a whole. Knowledge has become so vast that no single mind can speak with authority save in relation to his own particular corner of it. But such is the prestige of scientific expertism that scientists are apt to make far-reaching pronouncements about matters lying beyond their special competence, for instance about politics, ethics, religion and philosophy. One of the most serious problems of our day is to work out an educational technique which, while producing real

  read in context ↗
  Waking World (1934) ↗ · ¶ 278 — quoted passage in context

  C. SCEPTICAL PROTESTS IN THE MOOD which I am trying to describe we feel all this with complete certainty, and with a delight which is deeper than any other delight. But we may be mistaken, Indeed, it seems that in some way or other we must be mistaken, since this account of our religious experience is self- contradictory. We say almost in the same breath that the adventure of man ought to be heroically pursued to victory, yet that it is bound to be defeated in the end, and that, in spite of its defeat, the universe is perfectly beautiful. Is not this sheer nonsense? Some one is sure to ask us what exactly it is that delights us in a universe in which minds are so helpless and so tortured, in which, moreover, there will soon be no minds at all. Really, he may say, this is very queer music, which is beautiful although it is full of hideous discords, which consists simply in whatever happens, and is, moreover, in some strange way good in itself whether any one enjoys it or not. We have to admit that it is indeed strange. But there it is. This contradiction between, on the one hand, admiration of the known universe as in some sense perfect, excellent, wholly beautiful, and on the other hand, loyalty to the enterprise of man to spiritualize himself and his corner of the universe, lies in one form or another at the heart of all the great religions. It is at bottom the contradiction between fate and love; between, on the one hand, the acceptance of fate, or of ‘God’s will’, and, on the other, the love of human persons, or devotion in the cause of life’s struggle to become fully awake. And this devotion and this love are the roots of all morality. Well, there it is. We cannot give up either side of the contradiction, and yet we cannot solve it. When we have stripped religion of all precarious intellectual

  read in context ↗

The reconstruction of the Humanism lecture in this project has been calibrated against these findings, and the Interplanetary Man page in the reconstruction set now presents the published text itself beside the notes, as ground truth.

A further stroke of luck: the journal also printed the discussion that followed the 1948 address — including Stapledon’s extempore replies to the audience (and to the young Arthur C. Clarke, who formally opened the discussion; the biography adds that the address — “the most famous and often-reprinted talk he ever gave” — “originated from the invitation of a young man who would shortly become the best-known English science fiction writer of the second half of the century,” and that the evening ran two and a half hours, “in the formal lecture and in a discussion moderated by Clarke”). It is the only known verbatim published record of Stapledon answering questions from a platform. (Earlier editions of this analysis claimed it as the only published record outright; the biography shows the practice was routine and sometimes reported — his wartime Merseyside radio format “In the Witness Box” made him the weekly “witness” who “would have questions fired at him that demanded pointed, knowledgeable, and preferably witty replies,” and Youth and Tomorrow prints his own 1946 account, with dialogue, of fielding challenges at an RAF lecture — but those records are paraphrase or self-report, not transcripts. See ERRATA.md.) Its register confirms the calibration: courteous concession, homely firmness, no flourish — “we must also preserve a sense of humility and piety”; a superior race turning Earth into a reservation “would be the end of humanity, as it would lose the will to live.”

Note to the second edition (July 2026). This analysis was revised after a reader’s criticism of its first edition: the register has been tightened where it drifted toward essayistic overstatement, interpretive claims are hedged as such, and §2 now cites its evidence inline — every sheet reference links to that sheet in the scan-beside-transcription deck, and each movement carries a collapsible block embedding the diplomatic transcription of the sheets it discusses. The reconstruction itself now exists in three editions — spare (v1), performing (v2), and source-bounded with marked interpolations (v3) — so that no reading offered here need be taken on trust.

Note to the August 2026 printing. Six texts this analysis had previously quoted at second hand — the lecture’s own bookshelf — were acquired, transcribed where necessary (Otto, Huxley and Bentham are 1,038 pages of vision-model re-transcription from scans), read in full, and integrated: their quotations now resolve and link like everything else. The reading corrected one attribution (the push-pin wording is from Mill’s 1838 “Bentham,” not Utilitarianism — see ERRATA.md), extended §§2.2 and 2.6(b) and the §4 entries where the texts genuinely sharpened or complicated the picture (Otto’s dual structure confirmed in the sheets’ vocabulary, with a channel caveat via Huxley’s excerpts; Russell as inverse twin; Pope’s couplet as a prohibition; Huxley as rival rather than opposite), and left the rest alone.

Second note to the August 2026 printing. A further five context texts were acquired and read: Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode (read against sheet 24’s hedged aside, §2.6(b)); Keats’s soul-making journal-letter of spring 1819 (the source of the Brighton 1949 margin “Vale of Soul-Making (Keats),” now quoted beside it, §3.10); Freud’s The Future of an Illusion in Strachey’s 1961 translation (the sheet-12 duel re-run against Freud’s actual text, §2.4 — the translation is in copyright, so its reader page is an excerpt edition and the full text is held unpublished); Julian Huxley’s 1957 “Transhumanism” (the coinage tagged and read, §4; likewise excerpted); and a Gerald Heard scan supplied as The Ascent of Humanity (1929) that proved, by its own front matter and preface, to be the trilogy’s third book, The Source of Civilization (1935) — held, excerpted, and used for Heard’s own restatement of the Ascent thesis (§3.7); the true 1929 book was acquired in the August 2026 shelf round below, and §3.7 now checks the retrospective against it.

Note to the August 2026 biography pass. Robert Crossley’s Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future (1994) — the standard biography — was acquired, OCR’d from the owner’s page photographs, and read in full against a standing question list. The headline finding is negative and is stated in §1: the biography never mentions the 1934 South Place lecture, which falls in a demonstrable documentary gap in its apparatus; the present reconstruction appears to be the lecture’s first scholarly treatment. The biography also settled the Otto dating (§2.6(b): The Idea of the Holy is on the reading list in the 1933–34 diary), dated Nebula Maker to 1933 (§3.6), documented the Star Maker gestation around the lecture (§3.6), added the 1911 curtain letter and 1913 kinship letter to the genealogy (§3.1), gave the 1946 Conway Hall return its April companion and its November counterpoint (§3.8), sourced the “splendid race” to the Abbotsholme anthem (§3.11), and supplied the Brighton 1949 summation’s contemporary corroboration (§3.10). Four claims in earlier printings were corrected against it — the engagement date, the “doctoral thesis” label for A Modern Theory of Ethics, the troop-lecturing genesis of Beyond the “Isms”, and the “only published record of Q&A” claim — all itemized in ERRATA.md.

Note to the third edition (July 2026). This revision follows three independent audits of the project by different model families (GPT-5.6, Kimi K3, Fable 5), whose findings were adjudicated by the project’s owner and applied here after fresh verification against the manuscript and corpus. The principal corrections: the centerpiece now renders the manuscript’s “& Majesty” as the diagonal insertion it is; cancelled manuscript words are no longer quoted as live text (and one alleged cancellation — “other” on sheet 14 — was instead removed from the transcription after re-inspection of the 72-megapixel capture showed no strike); the “Instrumental to — what?” margin is described as the strike-and-restore it is; media claims (red vs. graphite vs. turquoise) were re-verified against the captures and the transcription’s color tags corrected where wrong (sheets 12 and 27); ages, intervals, speaker attributions and shaved hedges were repaired; §3.9 was reframed from confirmation toward the “institutionalized, doubted, and fictionalized” reading the later corpus supports; and §3.11 (hierarchy, eugenics, empire) was added. Audit claims that failed verification were not applied. The full itemized list is in the project’s ERRATA.md, and the adjudication record in review/FABLE5_ADJUDICATION_AND_FIXES.md.

Note to the August 2026 correction pass. A further external review (three-part, GPT-5.6 Sol), verified claim-by-claim against the sources before application, corrected this document in five places: §3.9 no longer runs the three late positions together into a “fictionalized endpoint” (the Brighton salute to an object left unknown, the practical-fiction floor of The Opening of the Eyes meditations 16–17, and that book’s restored address and commanded action are now kept distinct, matching §3.10’s own finding); §3.9’s completeness language is tiered to the held corpus (three nonfiction titles remain unheld, and recurrence, dependence and analogy are claimed separately); the Conway Hall witness is described at its true remove (a catalogue summary of a published abstract not yet acquired, §1); the Otto channel question is widened (Huxley’s 1927 excerpts carry both poles of the numinous, so second-hand transmission would explain the sheets’ dual structure too, §2.6(b)); and the Freud identification is restated as closest-comparator-possibly-source (sheet 12 names only psycho-analysis, §2.4). Details in ERRATA.md.

Prepared as part of the Humanism and Superhumanism reconstruction project. Sources (all read in full unless noted): the 34-sheet manuscript (ensemble transcription, 2026); Latter-Day Psalms (1914); Talking Across the World: The Love Letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, 1913–1919 (ed. Crossley, 1987); A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929); Last and First Men (1930); Last Men in London (1932); Waking World (1934); Odd John (1935); Nebula Maker (1933, per the dating in Crossley’s biography, pub. 1976 — the abandoned first draft of Star Maker; held for research, published in excerpt); Star Maker (1937); Philosophy and Living (1939, Vols. I–II); Beyond the “Isms” (1942; held for research, published in excerpt); Darkness and the Light (1942); Sirius (1944); Death into Life (1946); Youth and Tomorrow (1946); The Flames (1947); A Man Divided (1950); The Opening of the Eyes (1954, ed. Agnes Z. Stapledon — now held complete; held for research, published in excerpt); the collected short fiction including the 1916 FAU pieces, “Old Man in New World” (1944), “Arms Out of Hand” (1947) and Four Encounters; the complete surviving lecture-notes files, including “Is Humanism Enough?” (1946), “Science and Fiction” (1947), “Interplanetary Man?” and its published text and discussion (JBIS, 1948), and “Personality and the Paranormal” (1949); the rare essays and manuscripts recovered via An Olaf Stapledon Reader (ed. Crossley, 1997) — including “The Splendid Race” (1908), “The Reflections of an Ambulance Orderly” (1916), “Thoughts on the Modern Spirit” (c. 1928), the uncensored “The Remaking of Man” broadcast (1931), “The Core” (1945), “The Peak and the Town,” “Mankind at the Crossroads” (1947), “Letters to the Future,” and meditation 32 of The Opening of the Eyes; Sam Moskowitz, “Olaf Stapledon: The Man Behind the Works” (1979, quoting The Opening of the Eyes, 1954); Robert Crossley, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future (Syracuse University Press, 1994 — the standard biography; acquired August 2026 from the owner’s page photographs, OCR’d and read in full; in copyright, so held for research and quoted here in excerpt); the Conway Hall Ethical Society catalogue record of the lecture’s contemporary published abstract (Monthly Record, Vol. 40 No. 2, February 1935, pp. 3–4 — record and catalogue abstract held; the full two-page abstract is on request from Conway Hall, not yet held); and, from the lecture’s own bookshelf (all held complete, August 2026): Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733–34), Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807), Keats’s journal-letter on the vale of soul-making (21 April 1819, Rollins text), Bentham’s The Rationale of Reward (1825), Mill’s “Bentham” (1838), Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903), Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1917, trans. Harvey 1923), Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity Vols. I–II (1920), Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (1927, trans. Strachey 1961; held for research, published in excerpt), Julian Huxley’s Religion Without Revelation (1927) and “Transhumanism” (1957; held for research, published in excerpt), Gerald Heard’s The Source of Civilization (1935; held for research, published in excerpt — acquired as, but distinct from, the 1929 Ascent of Humanity) and The Ascent of Humanity itself (1929; acquired August 2026), and the August 2026 shelf read for §4 and §3: Haldane’s Possible Worlds (1927), Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), Bernal’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929), Coit’s National Idealism and a State Church (1907), Spiller’s The Ethical Movement in Great Britain (1934; held for research, published in excerpt), Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903) and Back to Methuselah (1921), Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907, trans. Mitchell 1911), Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (trans. Common), Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), and Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923) and Star Begotten (1937; held for research, published in excerpt).