But we may note that in one theory the essential meaning of the word "good" is the character of fulfilment of capacity or activity, and that this theory is borne out by the experience of disinterested admiration. For in this experience we seem to apprehend the world as fulfilling its own capacity or nature perfectly, though in a manner wholly distinct from the ordinary biological fulfilment. But if we are asked just how the world seems to fulfill itself, we cannot answer intelligibly, and can only plead that the experience is not necessarily deceptive because it cannot yet be rendered intelligible.

But whatever be the truth of these matters, this kind of experiencing, the deliverance of which certainly appears to many modem minds as the supreme good, calls for close attention to-day. For surely it is significant that though the dominant mood of our time is disillusion, our disillusion is strangely flecked with this other, seemingly contradictory, mood of admiration. In times of optimistic faith disinterested admiration is blended with, and indistinguishable from, gratitude toward a divine benefactor; but in times of disillusion it stands out sharply from its background. Thus we may conceive it not as doubtful evidence that "God is on our side," that the universe is after all kindly disposed to us, but as a spontaneous salutation. Our task, then, is to single it out from all that has hitherto confused it, and to recognise that, whatever its true intellectual significance, it is itself an intuition of a value which eclipses all other values. Certainly we must criticise it by bringing to bear on it all the material and instruments of modem knowledge. Certainly we must disentangle it from all the fair myths that have been woven round it. Certainly we must recognise that it offers no comfort, no hope, to our more primitive human longings. But also, in criticising it, we must develop the experience itself. For to-day there are many who, though they reject all the consolations of the churches as either unbelievable or trite, cannot but recognise in this unique act of the spirit the very essence of religion, and in the deliverance of this experience something indestructible and splendid, something in the light of which all other experience should be interpreted.

The Remaking of Man

On the evening of 2 April 1931, in the afterglow of the triumph of Last and First Men, Stapledon made his first national broadcast. The speech illuminates some episodes in Last and First Men but also recapitulates his old interests in eugenics and biological engineering. On 8 April the speech was the featured text in The Listener, the official publication of the B.B.C., which hailed Stapledon's "prominence as a historian of the future." Paragraph divisions were altered and some colloquialisms were formalized for the print medium; more importantly, the text was also abridged. While limitations of space may have been a factor, censorship - to which Stapledon was no stranger in his career - may also be suspected. The talk was branded as blasphemy by some who tuned in their radios, and the editor at The Listener saved space by excising, among others, precisely those sentences that rejected the immortality of the soul and hypothesized a godless universe. The version in this Reader, taken from the script on deposit at the B.B.C. Archive, is the full text of the broadcast and preserves the texture of Stapledon's speaking voice.

HUMAN NATURE is like our English climate. No one can be sure what it will do at a particular time and place, but we all know that it will be mostly dull or bad, and that it can't be altered.

That, at least, is the common view. Yet both the climate and human nature change. There have been ice- ages. There have been ape-men.

No doubt our own inborn nature is much like that of the earliest true men. But man has only been man for about a million years, and his future may be very much longer. The perfected men and women who are to come will probably regard us as quaint prehistoric monkeys, dignified by a mere spark of humanity. They will perhaps have changed so much that we shall scarcely recognise them as men and women at all. Possibly their bodies will have passed as far beyond the present human form as ours beyond the reptile. Even if they are still erect bipeds, their physiques will have been refashioned through and through by the aeons of natural events that are to come, and probably by artifice also. I should expect that if we could meet a man and woman of that race we should regard them as monstrously ugly. Yet, to one another, they would seem beautiful with a kind of beauty beyond our grasp. For those who had eyes to see, she, that woman of the future, would express in her strange body a far nobler and lovelier womanhood than is found in our world; and he a more virile, a more triumphantly human, manhood.

But let us think of things nearer home.