He remembered through many brains the air-fleet's journey across the sea, and equally the preparations of the citizens for defence. The conflicts of will between citizens and attackers, between the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the forward-looking and the backward-yearning, he felt as conflicts between his own discordant moods, in the days before his waking into clear self-knowledge.

For it seemed to him that during the lives of his many members he had always been present in them all; though impotent, paralysed, sunk in a vast and incoherent dream. Always his members were divided from one another in location and in allegiance. And though in every one of them he had sometimes drowsily awakened and assumed precarious rule, never in those past lives had he, the loftier being, ruled for long.

'But I, I, what is it that I really am?' This question tormented him. 'If indeed I am no more than the spirit emergent in this night's killed, how comes it that I was alive in them before ever they were united in death? No! Though I possess the experience of this small company alone, I am indeed far more than their emergent spirit. I am that in all men which craves the light. Then why am I thus confined to a small company, and they all dead? Surely I am far more than the spirit of those few dead. I am the spirit of the dead of all lands and ages, and it is I that am immanent in all the living also. Always, in every generation since men first were men, I, I was the identical spirit in them. Then how comes it that I know nothing but those few ended lives?'

Through his experience of his dead members he now, chafing at the limitations and disabilities of those few, tried to form a clear view of the great world in which they had so briefly and so blindly lived. For though each of them had his unique world-view, none saw far, all saw crookedly. Vaguely therefore, the perplexed spirit of those killed pieced together from his members' experience a fragmentary and incoherent vision of the plight of mankind upon its little planet.

Vaguely he saw the nations summoning all their strength for war; vaguely the slaughter, the hate, the fear, the universal hunger for peace. And still more vaguely he was aware of the deeper crisis of our age, the crumbling of the old world, the painful birth of the new. Vaguely he saw that the perennial inner drama in each man's heart, the battle between darkness and the light, was in this moment of mankind's long life most crucial.

Surveying the fragmentary visions of his members, he was tormented by their inconsistency and triviality, and tantalized by the veiled and surmised features of high truth; so that he cried, 'Blind and paralysed that I am, I must, must wake and be my whole self. I must possess all men. I must know the whole truth about mankind. I must be a power in all men's hearts. I must take action.'

Then suddenly the being who had emerged from those few killed mortals was assailed by the overwhelming onset of a crowding host of presences, by the individual minds of all who had been killed in this long war, and in the last war, and in all wars in all ages, and all who had died violent deaths in any way since man began, and all whose end had come by disease or sheer old age. And when the myriads of the dead had flooded upon him, there came at last the living, the two thousand million, white and black, yellow and brown, living their little various lives under the wide shadow of war. He knew them inwardly through their own experience, but also outwardly through their experience of each other. His consciousness widened to cover the whole field of human mentality; as an exploding star spreads its light-waves in an expanding sphere of illumination through the dark surrounding nebula. The massed experience of all living persons in all lands, fell upon him in an increasing cataract. But though he was compelled to be present in all these minds, he his very self remained distinct from them. They were voices sounding in his ears, not experiences of his own. Seemingly for a lifetime, an aeon, the cataract thundered upon him, while he battled to keep his identity afloat; yet all happened within the instant.

Piecemeal visions of the whole terrestrial globe, seen through two thousand millions pairs of eyes, inexorably assailed him; visions of night and day, of dreamlands and waking life, of tropical jungles and temperate champaigns and the planet's frozen extremities, visions of plains and hills and storms at sea, of remote crofts and shacks and homesteads, and of a thousand cities; visions of factory-work and tillage, of miners at the coal face and hunters in the northern forests, of company meetings and cathedral services; visions of war.

A babel of voices also resounded in his tortured mind, speaking in many languages, all of which were perfectly familiar to him, voices of American citizens discussing investments, of German gauleiters enforcing discipline, of Indian peasants imploring food, of Russian tractor-drivers, Chinese students, and all the kinds and races of humanity. He heard inarticulate bellowings of hate, balanced sentences of persuasion and discussion, whispered instructions passed from soldier to soldier in ambush, and all the sweet and secret communications of lovers. Their embraces also he poignantly felt, in mansions and slums, on haystacks and in dark alleys. Through innumerable hands he felt the soft curves of human limbs, the textures of cloth and wood, and cold metal. Through a host of feet he felt the surface of the earth, the hot desert, the snowfields, the city pavements, the moors. Equally all the smells invaded him, of sweat and roses, corpses and sea breezes, of the hot tarmac and the cold smoke-laden fog, of spent explosives, dust, and blood and entrails.