He has no direction, or it is the wrong one. Evolution is decreative. The trend of the heavens, as of radioactivity, as of every ultimate thing and process, is from elaborate to less elaborate, from complex to simple, from changeable to changeless. Evolution on the earth, being the other way, is swimming against the tide of the universe; like walking along a corridor train in the opposite direction to its motion, along a travelling ship from prow to stern. Cosmically considered, life is a perversion. … He has no direction, or it is the wrong one. The road? It has brought him from Arcadia to Armageddon, and now is shooting to the Abyss. The drift and net movement is downward—each heart of us knows it, wallow in make-believe how we may. At the best, the graph of man’s history, switchback Spenglerian rhythm of civilizations that rise and fall, leaves each new downward dip no higher than the dip before; at the fond fantastic best, no higher. A goal? It is the song of fools. A standard-bearer? He fainteth not; he is not. We poor perishing people have no leader; no light, no faith, no Lord. Christ is dead in His tomb, not risen; Christ is worms and clay. Where is an ensign to the nations? Where is a banner upon the mountains? Where, to guide us through a world now pushed past the stars, where now is a Star? Horrible infinite world, by the mirage of knowledge stretched out through space and through time unto eternity. Where is a Jesus for eternity? Where is Immanuel of the Infinite?
The optimists’ last bid for human victory is also their boldest. Even if it so be that man must go under, he will have found replacement by a tribe of gods; whether the children of his body made more than human by untold centuries of the work of his brain, or whether children of his brain alone, a triumph-people, raised artificially. Paracelsus first tried his hand. Put so much sperma viri in an alambic; stir, keep warm. After forty days you will see a tiny creature moving about in the bottom of the still. Keep him there for forty weeks at the temperature of a horse’s belly; feed him on human blood; at the end of the forty weeks he will have developed into a small but perfect human being. Whether or no the great magician himself succeeded with his recipe, Homunculus certainly had no children, started no rival race. Far other will be the expectations of the later life makers. Cyanic acid is an odd new name, and there are newer and odder, for Jove or Jehovah; but he—it—or someone much like her—seems to have been our first parent. Somehow, by the cyanogen bridge or some such other, the gulf incredible between inorganic matter and the lowest organism, between the dead and the living, was crossed. Crossed once, it will be crossed again. If, despite a thousand experiments as strange as the homuncular, no one yet has made life in the laboratory, success one day will come; and then, under man’s guidance, a type of life will, through millions of years, though needing less millions than blundering nature, be evolved along new lines until in the fullness of time it reaches new heights, there at last to supplant its humbler creator and inherit the earth forever.
Humanity, answers the soul of our sadness, far from fooling with cyanogen or semen, with biochemical blasphemies of creation or prolongation, far from seeking to make other life, will, long ages before the astronomical limit, have likelier made away with its own. Ages earlier the creatures of dust will, of sad choice, have returned to the earth as they were; and the spirit, if there be spirit, unto God Who gave it. Increased awareness of the inevitable will, as the ice rises (water goes, star comes) decide man not to fight. Realizing that no schemes can avert or avail, that all he has laboured for, great works and great estate, wisdom and empires, visions social and celestial, blood flowing through veins eternal, is to end only in this, in a Last Man who must lay himself down to die, then he will say: Why tarry? There is a time to be born, it is Never; there is a time to die, it is Now. Reproduction then will appear a heartless crime, saving sons from life the one good, and the far-off Malthusians and perverts and contracepts of the earth’s dawn-time halo’d sages and heroic forerunners, and statues—oh Thomas! oh Oscar! oh Marie!—will be set up to you in every snow-fast city of the dying world. … Gainsaying life to his children, man will deny it at last to himself; a universal felo-de-se of the soul forestalling the fading sun, death from within the death from without. Desire shall fail; he shall desire but to die, and death shall not flee from him.
Between these frantic guessed antipodes of perdition and glory we choose as we will or must, as mental bias suggests, as sense of humour or horror allows, as hope or fear of immortality decides. We may feel that, through the unnumbered years Time vouchsafeth, one day the long curve will shoot up
