Today incalculable misery and waste of life are due to sheer imprudence and selfishness. Most of us are for ever failing to resist momentary temptations, even when we know that our own lasting welfare is at stake. And as for loving our neighbours as ourselves, we seldom have enough imagination to realise them as human beings at all, and even when we do we almost never regard them without prejudice in favour of ourselves.

Now, as I see things, all this has to be altered, either by nature or by artifice. The man and woman of the far future will, of course, be each one of them a vivid personality; but also each one of them will imaginatively realise, not merely a few intimates, but the whole race, as a glorious community of fellow- workers. They will no more be tempted to put private interest before public interest than we are tempted to test out razors by cutting our own throats. In fact, as I see it, their neural organisation will be so perfect that they will always choose to do whatever is seen to be best in the light of all the circumstances.

Yet they will not be moral prigs. Probably they will not care anything for righteousness as an end in itself. They will just be sane, with an order of sanity quite impossible to us. Imprudence and selfishness they will regard as mere madness.

Some of you think, perhaps, that a race of such inordinately perfect beings would lack all the variety of character and caprice of conduct that make us so fascinating to the novelist and so unreliable in real life. Yes, and no. Reliable the remade men and women would certainly be; but they would not lack diversity. On the contrary, I should expect them to regard us as mere sheep, afflicted with a most wearisome sameness and poverty of character. For their own nature would have a far more complex gamut on which to play infinitely diverse themes of temperament.

Do not think, either, that they will be bloodless highbrows. Compared with us they will be both more spiritual and more animal. For in us, poor transitional creatures that we are, the fact that we have not courage or strength to be fully men troubles us with a morbid shame of being animal. But in them the spiritual and the animal would both be stronger, and each perfectly harmonious with the other. They will enjoy food and drink, and play, with the zest of children. They will delight in their variegated and colourful world with a barbarian fervour, yet also with piety. They will lover each other's exquisite bodies no less than their subtle minds. Their whole instinctive nature, no doubt, will have been remade and harmonised; but far from being subdued, it will be enriched and completely shameless. They will surely be devoid of those conflicts and obscene repressions which distort and cripple our minds so often without our knowing it. On the other hand, they will not make the modem mistake of supposing primitive instinctive fulfilment to be all that matters.

Then what, you ask, will these very far future and tiresomely perfect beings do? Well, their most serious racial enterprise will of course be concerned with matters as remote from us as ours from a rabbit. Perhaps they will once more be striving to remake man for some high destiny beyond our comprehension. Perhaps, since there is a limit to the weight of brain that a single organism can safely carry, they will need to put all brains into some kind of telepathic union with one another, so that, for certain purposes, all may function together as one brain, capable of some higher order of experience. Perhaps they will have discovered that man's true end is to contemplate and enjoy the whole world of space and time and living forms, with whatever insight he may, before the ultimate frost destroys him. But whatever man's final goal may be, for us the general direction is clear. Man in our day is faced with two problems. The first is one on which all will agree, namely, to make possible a full and happy life for whatever individuals that occur in this and succeeding generations. The second is to begin to learn to see man in his cosmic setting, and to discover how to make of him, in the fullness of time, the best that can possibly be made. For in our modern age the human race seems to be going through a crisis something like the passage of the individual from childhood to boyhood.