Chapter XXIII (part 13)

From our standpoint it is clearly impossible to regard a man sitting in the horse's saddle as a fact of horse evolution, but from the point of view of the scientist who knows nothing about man, this will be only logical. Dr. Bucke finds himself in exactly this position when he regards that which transcends the region of humanity altogether as a fact of human evolution. Man possessing cosmic consciousness, or approaching cosmic consciousness is not merely man, but man with something higher added. Dr. Bucke, like Edward Carpenter in many cases also, is handicapped by the desire not to go too strongly counter to accepted views (although that is inevitable); by the desire to reconcile those views with the "new thought," to flatten out contradictions, to reduce everything to one thing, which is of course impossible—as is the reconciliation of correct and incorrect, true and false views upon one and the same thing. ______ The greater part of Dr. Bucke's book consists of examples and quotations from the teachings and writings of men of "cosmic consciousness" in the history of the world. He draws parallels between these teachings, and establishes the unity of the forms of transition into the new state of consciousness in men of different centuries and of different peoples, and the unity of their sensations of the world and of the self, testifying more than anything else to the genuineness and reality of their experiences. p. 324 The founders of world-religions, prophets, philosophers, poets—these are men of "cosmic consciousness" according to Dr. Bucke's book. He does not pretend to present a full list of them, and it is of course possible to add many names to his list. 1 But after all, various little imperfections of Dr. Bucke's book are not important, nor additions which might possibly be made. What is important is the general conclusion to which Dr. Bucke comes—the possibility and the immanence of the NEW CONSCIOUSNESS. All this announces to us the nearness of the NEW HUMANITY. We are building without taking into consideration the fact that a NEW MASTER must come who may not at all like everything that we have built. Our "social sciences," sociology, and so forth, have in view only man, while as I have several times shown before, the concept "man" is a complex one, and includes in itself different categories of men going along different paths. The future belongs not to man , but to superman , who is already born, and lives among us. A higher race is rapidly emerging among humanity, and it is emerging by reason of its quite remarkable understanding of the world and life. It will be truly a HIGHER RACE—and there will be no possibility of any falsification, any substitution, or any usurpation at all. It will be impossible for anything to be bought , or appropriated to oneself by deceit or by might. Not only will this race be, but it already is. The men approaching the transition into a new race begin already to know one another: already are established pass-words and counter-signs. And perhaps those social and political questions so sharply put forward in our time may be solved on quite another plane and p. 325 by quite a different method than we think—may be solved by the entrance into the arena of a new race CONSCIOUS OF ITSELF which will judge the old races. _____ In my remarks I called attention to certain imperfections in Dr. Bucke's book arising chiefly from a strange indecisiveness of his, from his timidity in asserting the dominant significance of the new consciousness. This results from the desire of Dr. Bucke to establish the future of humanity from a positivistic standpoint upon social and political revolutions. But we may regard this view as having lost all validity.