Out of Their Minds (6 page)

I picked up the manila envelope again and ripped it open. Out of it came a sheaf of Xeroxed pages with a handwritten note clipped to them.

The note said:

Dear Horton: When I went through the papers in Uncle's desk, I ran across the enclosed and, knowing you were one of his closest and most valued friends, I ran off a copy for you. Frankly, I don't know what to make of it. With some other man I might think it was nothing more than a fantasy that, for some whimsical, personal reason, he had written down—perhaps to clear it from his mind. But Uncle was not whimsical, as I think you will agree. I am wondering if he might at some time have mentioned this to you. If such should be the case, you may have a better understanding of it than I seem able to muster—Philip.

I pulled the note clear from the stapled Xeroxed sheets and there, in the crabbed, miserly handwriting of my friend (a handwriting so unlike the man himself), was the document.

There was no heading on the sheet. Nothing to tell what he had intended it to be.

I settled down into the chair and began to read.

5

The evolutionary process (the document began) is a phenomenon which has been of special and absorbing interest to me all my life, although in my own particular field I have been concerned only with one small, and perhaps unspectacular, aspect of it. As a professor of history, I have been more and more intrigued, as the years go on, with the evolutionary trend of human thought. I would be ashamed to enumerate how many times I've tried and how many hours I've spent in attempting to draw up a graph or chart or diagram, or whatever one might call it, to show the change and development in human thought through all historic ages. The subject, however, is too vast and too diverse (and in some instances, I might as well confess, too contradictory) to lend itself to any illustrative scheme I've been able to devise. And yet I am sure that human thought has been evolutionary, that the basis of it has shifted steadily through all of man's recorded time, that we do not think as we did a hundred years ago, that our opinions are much changed from a thousand years ago, not so much attributable to the fact that we now have better knowledge upon which to base our thinking, but that the human viewpoint has undergone a change—an evolution, if you please.

It may seem amusing that anyone should become so absorbed in the process of human thought. But those who think it amusing would be wrong. For it is the capability of abstract thought and nothing else which distinguishes the human being from any other creature that lives upon the earth.

Let us take a look at evolution, without attempting, or pretending to delve deeply into it, only touching a few of those more obvious landmarks which we are told by paleontologists highlight the path of progress from that primal ocean in which the first microscopic forms of life came into being at a very distant time. Not hunting for, or concerning ourselves with all the subtle changes which marked development, but only noting some of the horizon lines which stand out as a result of all those subtle changes.

One of those first great landmarks must necessarily be the emergence of certain life forms from the water to live upon the land. This ability to change environment undoubtedly was a much protracted and perhaps a painful and probably a hazardous procedure. But to us today time telescopes it into a single event which stands out as a high point in the evolutionary scheme. Another high point was the development of the notochord which, in millions of years to come, evolved into a backbone. Yet another high point was the development of bipedal locomotion, although I, personally, am inclined to discount somewhat the significance of the erect position. If one talks of man, it was not the ability to walk erect, but the ability to think beyond the moment and in other terms than the here and now that made him what he is today.

The evolutionary process represents a long chain of events. Many evolutionary trends ran their courses and were discarded and many species became extinct because they were tied inxorably into some of those evolutionary trends. But it was always from some factor, or perhaps from many factors which were involved in the development of those extinct life forms, that new evolutionary lines arose. And the thought must occur to one that through all this tangled jungle of change and modification there must have run a single central core of evolution pointing toward some final form. Through all the millions of years, that central evolutionary form, now expressed in man, lay in the slow growth of a brain which in time became a mind.

One thing, it seems to me, that stands out in the evolutionary process is that while developments, once they've happened, do make uncommon sense, no observer before the fact could have made a valid prediction that they were about to happen. It would not have made good sense for an observer, a half billion years ago, to have predicted that in a few more million years life forms would leave the water and live upon the land. It would have seemed, as a matter of fact, a most unlikely thing, well-nigh impossible. For life forms as they were then constructed, needed the water; they could live nowhere else but in the water. And the land of that day, sterile and barren, must have seemed as incredibly hostile to life as space seems to us today.

Life forms, half a billion years ago, were small. Smallness then must have seemed as much a part of life as water. No observer in that day could possibly have imagined the monster dinosaurs of later ages, or the modern whale. Such size the observer would have thought to be impossible. Flying he would not have thought of at all; it would have been a concept which would not have crossed his mind. And even if, by some remote chance, it had, he would have seen no way for it to happen, or no reason for it.

So while we can look back, after the fact, and sense the validity and the rightness of all evolutionary progress, there seems no way in which it can be predicted.

The question of what may come after man is a thought which has arisen at times, although largely as a matter of idle speculation. There is a reluctance, I would imagine, for anyone to think too seriously of it. Most people would believe, if they thought of it at all, that it is a question which lies so far in the future that it is senseless for one to give it consideration. The primates have been around only eighty million years or so, perhaps somewhat less than that; man for only two or three million, even at the most optimistic calculation. So, measured against the trilobites and dinosaurs, the primates have many millions of years still left before they become extinct or before they lose their position of dominance upon the earth.

Also there may be a reluctance to admit, even by the thinking of it, that man ever will become extinct. Some men (by no means all of them) can reconcile themselves to the realization that they, personally, some day will die. A man can imagine the world with himself no longer in it; it is far more difficult to imagine an earth with no humans left. We shy away, with some strange inner fear, from the death of the species. We know, intellectually, if not emotionally, that some day we, as members of the human race, will cease to exist; it is difficult to think, however, that the human race itself is not immortal and eternal. We can say that man is the only species which has developed the means by which he can bring about his own extinction. But while we may say this, we do not, in our hearts, believe it.

What little serious speculation there has been about this subject has not really been about it at all. There seems to be a mental block which prevents consideration of it. We almost never speculate upon what might supersede man; what we do is to conjure up a future superman—inhuman in many ways, perhaps, but still a man. Alienated from us in a mental and intellectual sense, but still, biologically, a man. Even here, in this kind of speculation, we perpetuate the stubborn belief that man will go on forever and forever.

This, of course, is wrong. Unless the evolutionary process, in bringing forth the human race, has reached a dead end, there will be something more than man. History would seem to say that the evolutionary process has not reached a dead end. Through the ages there has been evidence that the principle of evolution is never at a loss to produce new life forms or to introduce new survival values. There is no reason to believe, on present evidence, that in man the evolutionary process has used up all its bag of tricks.

So there will be something after man, something other than man. Not just an extension or modification of man, but something entirely different. We ask, in horror and disbelief, what could supersede man, what could beat intelligence?

I believe I know.

I believe the superseder is already in existence and has been for many years.

Abstract thought is a new thing in the world. No other creature than man ever has been blessed (or cursed) with such a faculty. It took from us the old security accorded other creatures which are aware of nothing except the here and now, and in some cases aware only dimly of the here and now. It let us look into the past and, what is worse, peer darkly futureward. It made us aware of loneliness, and filled us with a hope, from which stemmed hopelessness, and it showed us how we stood alone, naked and defenseless, before the uncaring of the cosmos. That day when the first manlike creature became aware of the implications of space and time as related to himself must be classed, at once, as the most fearful and most glorious day in the history of life upon the earth.

We used our intelligence for many practical purposes and for theoretical probing which, in turn, gave us other answers for practical application. And we used it for something else as well. We used it to fill an enigmatic world with many shadowy creatures—with gods, devils, angels, ghosts, nymphs, fairies, brownies, goblins. We created in our tribal minds a dark and warring world in which we had enemies and allies. And we created other mythical creatures which were neither dark nor fearsome, but simply pleasant products of our imagination—Santa Claus, the Easter Rabbit, Jack Frost, the Sandman, and many, many others. Not only did we create these things intellectually, but we believed in them in varying degrees. We saw them and we talked of them and they were very real to us. Why, if not for fear of meeting such things, did the peasants of medieval days in Europe bar their hovels at the fall of night and refuse to venture out? Why the fear of the dark still inherent in many modern men if it is not the fear of meeting something in the dark? Today we talk but little of these things of the dark, but that the old uneasiness and fear may still be with us is demonstrated by the wide belief today in such things as flying saucers. In this enlightened day it may be childish to talk of werewolf or of ghoul, but it is all right to believe in a technical wraith such as a flying saucer.

What do we know of abstract thought? The answer, of course, is that we know nothing of it. There is a possibility, I understand, that it may be electrical in nature and that it is based upon some sort of energy exchange, for the physicists tell us that all processes must be based on energy. But what do we know, actually, either of electricity or of energy? What do we know, when one comes down to it, about anything at all? Do we know how the atom works or why it works or what an atom is? Can anyone explain the awareness of self and environment which distinguishes life from inorganic matter?

We think of thought as a mental process and we do lip service to the physicists by admitting that an energy exchange must somehow be involved. But we know no more about the thought processes, perhaps even less, than the ancient Greeks knew about the atom. Democritus, who lived during the fourth century before Christ, is generally accorded the honor of being the first man to put forward the atomic theory, and this was, admittedly, an advance in thinking, but the atoms of Democritus were a far cry, indeed, from what we now think of as atoms—and, which, incidentally, we still do not understand. So we talk of thought today as the Greeks in the day of Democritus may have talked (although only briefly and without too much conviction or belief) about the atom, and with as little understanding. We are, when it comes down to the truth of it, only mouthing words.

We do know something of the result of thought. All that mankind has today is the product of his thinking. But this is the result of the impact of the thought upon the human animal, as steam makes an impact upon a mechanism and makes an engine run.

We might ask, once the steam has made its impact and performed its function, what happens to the steam? I think that it is as logical to ask, once thought has made its impact, what happens to the thought—to that exchange of energy which we are told is necessary to bring about and produce the thought.

I think I know the answer. I believe that thought, the energy of thought, whatever strange form thought itself might take, streaming unceasingly through the centuries from the minds of billions of men and women, has given rise to a group of beings which in time, perhaps a not too distant time, will supersede the human race.

Thus the superseding species arises from that very mechanism, the mind, which has made mankind the dominant species of today. This, as I read the record, is the way that evolution works.

Man has built with his hands, but he builds with mind as well, and I believe better and somewhat differently than he might imagine.

One man's thought about a vicious, ghoulish shape lurking in the dark would not bring that lurking shape into actual being. But an entire tribe, all thinking (and afraid) of this same ghoulish shape would bring it, I believe, into actual being. The shape was not there to start with. It existed only in the mind of one man, crouching frightened in the dark. And frightened of he knew not what, he felt he must give shape to this thing of fear and so he imagined it and told the others what he had imagined and they imagined it as well. And they imagined it so long and well and so believed in it that eventually they created it.

Evolution works in many ways. It works in any way it can. That it had never operated in quite this way before may merely have been because until the human mind developed it never possessed an agency which would allow it to bring about actual entities out of the sheer force of imagination. And not out of imagination alone, not by wishful thinking, but out of the forces and energies which man as yet does not understand and may never understand.