s of natural selection must
drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have
begun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy characters
in fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obliged
to supply them with work, found too much of everything done in too short
a time. What demons so potent as molecular movements, none the less
tremendously potent for not carrying the futile cargo of a consciousness
screeching irrelevantly, like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of
a swift horseman? Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will
have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the
time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a
few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become
pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold
around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the
ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been
overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely
more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less
energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle
in the sunlight Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments
happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined
itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted
existences do before the fittest--i.e., the existence composed of the
most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of
incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who--if our
consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling
of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection--who shall say
that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what
we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate
processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals
are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the
earth's crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be
blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate
and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of
what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without
sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute
rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even