Eclipse of Man. Charles T. Rubin
distinguishes it from most similar presentations in our own day: Reade believes that nature is purposive—and indeed, that something like a cunning of nature is evident in human history.22 That is to say, human activities like war and religion, or conditions like inequality, serve developmental purposes within a natural scheme of things beyond what is intended by the human beings participating in those activities.23 “Thus when Nature selects a people to endow them with glory and with wealth her first proceeding is to massacre their bodies, her second, to debauch their minds. She begins with famine, pestilence, and war; next, force and rapacity above; chains and slavery below. She uses evil as the raw material of good; though her aim is always noble, her earliest means are base and cruel. But, as soon as a certain point is reached, she washes her black and bloody hands, and uses agents of a higher kind.”24
To put it another way, Reade believes that there is a natural imperative for higher abilities and capacities to grow out of lower ones: “The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness. Loyalty and piety, the reverential virtues, are developed from filial love. Benevolence and magnanimity, the generous virtues, from parental love. The sense of decorum proceeds from the sense of cleanliness; and that from the instinct of sexual display.”25 Reade’s claim that the higher derives from the lower does not just apply to human beings. It is a characteristic of life itself, indeed a characteristic of matter, which he regards as inseparable from mind.26
We ought not to think there is anything degrading about thus understanding the higher in light of the lower, Reade argues. Indeed, his reductionism opens the door to remarkable possibilities:
It is Nature’s method to take something which is in itself paltry, repulsive, and grotesque, and thence to construct a masterpiece by means of general and gradual laws; those laws themselves being often vile and cruel. This method is applied not only to single individuals, but also to the whole animated world; not only to physical but also to mental forms. And when it is fully realised and understood that the genius of man has been developed along a line of unbroken descent from the simple tendencies which inhabited the primeval cell, and that in its later stages this development has been assisted by the efforts of man himself, what a glorious futurity will open to the human race! It may well be that our minds have not done growing, and that we may rise as high above our present state as that is removed from the condition of the insect and the worm.27
That we can assist in our own uplift and greatly transcend what we are today is crucial to Reade’s picture of the future, as it is to today’s transhumanists. In the natural order of things, the individual human life has limited potential, precisely because by nature we are parts of a whole with at least potentially greater significance:
As the atoms are to the human unit, so the human units are to the human whole. . . . Nature does not recognise their individual existence. But each atom is conscious of its life; each atom can improve itself in beauty and in strength; each atom can therefore, in an infinitesimal degree, assist the development of the Human Mind. If we take the life of a single atom, that is to say of a single man, or if we look only at a single group, all appears to be cruelty and confusion; but when we survey mankind as One, we find it becoming more and more noble, more and more divine, slowly ripening towards perfection.28
That Reade believes mankind is “slowly ripening towards perfection” implies that he is tolerably certain he understands the immediate project that faces humanity, and at least some of its longer-term consequences. Although he claims that he does not mean to suggest that humanity will ever understand the ultimate purpose of creation,29 he feels confident enough to assert that man was
not sent upon the earth to prepare himself for existence in another world; he was sent upon earth that he might beautify it as a dwelling, and subdue it to his use; that he might exalt his intellectual and moral powers until he had attained perfection, and had raised himself to that ideal which he now expresses by the name of God, but which, however sublime it may appear to our weak and imperfect minds, is far below the splendour and majesty of that Power by whom the universe was made.30
By the power of science rather than prayer, Earth, “which is now a purgatory, will be made a paradise.”31 The genuinely “Sacred Cause” is “the extinction of disease, the extinction of sin, the perfection of genius, the perfection of love, the invention of immortality, the exploration of the infinite, the conquest of creation.”32
So by making men mortal and immoral, nature points humanity in the direction of immortality and morality so long as we exercise our intelligence.33 Reade could already see signs of progress in this direction: “Life is full of hope and consolation; we observe that crime is on the decrease, and that men are becoming more humane. The virtues as well as the vices are inherited; in every succeeding generation the old ferocious impulses of our race will become fainter and fainter, and at length they will finally die away.”34 Delusions about an immortal soul will only stand in the way of such efforts; Christianity, which Reade treats under general headings such as “Religion” and “superstition,” will have eventually done the work intended of it as a tool of nature, and at that point can and must be destroyed, for it is in the nature of these tools to become obstructions once they have brought life to the next level.35 While human beings may never rival the great Creator of all things, there is a long way to go before that would become an issue.36 Echoing Francis Bacon,37 Reade notes that “we can conquer Nature only by obeying her laws, and in order to obey her laws we must first learn what they are. When we have ascertained, by means of Science, the method of Nature’s operations, we shall be able to take her place and to perform them for ourselves.”38 Nature intends that we rebel against being the serfs of nature.39
Having placed immortality explicitly on the agenda of the future, Reade considers space travel a necessary consequence:
Disease will be extirpated; the causes of decay will be removed; immortality will be invented. And then, the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe.40
When human beings “invent” immortality we press beyond the natural order of things in which we are mere cells in a larger whole, and when we die are dead forever. In similar fashion, with space travel we will also have proven the essentially mundane character of the once-transmundane heavens. Yet Reade’s imaginative assurance about the great things ahead for humanity puts in high relief the ignorance and miseries of humanity today.
These bodies which now we wear belong to the lower animals; our minds have already outgrown them; already we look upon them with contempt. A time will come when Science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which, even if explained to us, we could not now understand, just as the savage cannot understand electricity, magnetism, steam.41
This is a glorious future, one in which men will be “perfect,” having the power of “what the vulgar worship as a god.”42 But Reade recognizes—more so than did Condorcet—that this vision is not entirely consoling. In a prayer-like passage, he acknowledges that it makes the ills of the present look all the more terrible, and the past a yet darker place:
You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream; you pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth; when you turn back your eyes on us poor savages, grubbing in the ground for our daily bread, eating flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level with the beasts, tortured by pains, and by animal propensities, buried in gloomy superstitions, ignorant of Nature which yet holds us in her bonds; when you read of us in books, when you think of what we are, and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur, to us who now in our libraries and laboratories and star-towers and dissecting-rooms and work-shops are preparing the materials of the human growth. And as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us remember how much more fortunate