"Olaf Stapledon - Rare stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

The work that is to be done is not merely negative. Not only must we prevent unsuitable marriages. Not
only are the diseases and weaknesses of humanity to be purged away. When the phenomena discovered
by Gregor Mendel have been more deeply studied, it may be possible to begin the great positive work of
cultivating and fixing the existing desirable qualities of humanity. Perhaps sometime there may appear
some entirely new and highly desirable character. This also must be accentuated and fixed, in the
manner that favourable "sports" have been fixed by horticulturists. To perform all this it will be
necessary in some way to encourage particular classes of marriages. In the present condition of
sentiment this seems impossible. We can but hope that in time every man will be naturally inclined to
find a wife well suited to himself for the sake of his children.
As yet we are very far from this. But, having stumbled for a long time in the valleys, at last we have
arrived at an eminence from which the right way can be seen leading upwards into the mists. It may be
that after much labour and many catastrophes in time there will arise a splendid race of men, far wiser
than we can hope to be, and far greater hearted.




Thoughts on the Modern Spirit
Unpublished and undated, but in a corrected final typescript, "Thoughts on the Modern Spirit" contains
Stapledon most thoughtful speculations on the intersection of literary experiment and philosophical
inquiry. More clearly than anything else he wrote, this essay suggests the extent of (and boundaries of)
Stapledon's affinity with the modernist movement. The prominence of Alfred North Whitehead in the
essay reflects an extensive study of Whitehead's work, especially Science and the Modern World,
Stapledon undertook as a postdoctoral participant in Liverpool University's Philosophy Seminar in 1927-
1928. The allusion to Noel Coward's song "Dance Little Lady," from the 1928 play This Year of Grace,
suggests that the essay may have been written just after the Seminar, probably before Stapledon began
serious work on Last and First Men in the late summer of 1928. His absorption in that project may
explain why he never made an attempt to publish "Thoughts on the Modern Spirit." It remains an

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intriguing guide to his mind and art in the period when he achieved his first literary and philosophical
successes.
THOUGH THE MODERN SPIRIT knows many moods, two are distinctive of it: complete disillusion,
and zestful but wholly detached admiration of a world conceived as indifferent to human purposes.
Many no doubt still retain their confidence in man's importance, and in his prospects here or hereafter,
but for good or ill this faith is not a factor in the characteristically modem spirit. Nor is it among these
optimists that we may find the most active growing-points of thought to-day. Not that faith itself stands
condemned as in every possible sense false, but only that the faithful, having never allowed themselves
to be drenched and impregnated with disillusion, cannot understand the spiritual problem of our age. Just
because, or insofar as, their faith is intact, it is also infertile.
Our problem may be described as the task of outgrowing both the naive optimism of an earlier age and
the naive disillusion of to-day. The problem is urgent, not because disillusion is unwholesome, but
because already there are signs that the pendulum is beginning to swing once more in the direction of
faith; and unless we can integrate faith and disillusion in some new mood which will preserve whatever
is sound in each, we shall merely slip back into our old naive optimism, for no better reason than that we
begin to tire of disillusion. In psychological terms, humanity is prone to a dissociation of faith and
disillusion, and a consequent "alternation of personalities." Our task is to organise these two sentiments