First Men

The First Men are the first human species in the book’s history, portrayed not as a settled stage of progress but as a brief, unstable awakening of human powers. They struggle from savagery toward civilization and reach a cultural zenith, yet their minds already show signs of decline by the era of the book’s original readers. Their history supplies the chronicle’s earliest sustained example of a species capable of conceiving ideals and wielding dangerous powers without reliably acquiring the inner discipline needed to govern either.

Place in the human chronology

From the perspective of the Last Men, the First Men occupy a precocious but incomplete moment in the awakening of human consciousness. Their ascent from savagery is real, but it does not become a steady march toward a perfected society: the culture near its zenith is already faltering. The book’s long view makes that combination of achievement and decline fundamental to their identity. They can glimpse forms of thought and social life that exceed their inherited nature, but the glimpse alone does not transform them.

The First Men also serve as the baseline against which later human species and civilizations can be viewed. Their history establishes a recurring tension between creative aspiration and collapse, without suggesting that later peoples simply repeat their lives in identical form. The chronicle’s account of the Third Men, for instance, describes repeated cultural rises and collapses, including renewed attempts to remake humanity. That later recurrence gives the First Men’s failures historical reach: they introduce a problem the book will revisit across immense spans of time.

Ideals beyond their capacity

The book identifies two major ethical and intellectual achievements of First Men culture in the figures of Socrates and Jesus. Socrates represents delight in truth for its own sake, intellectual honesty, and dispassionate thought; Jesus represents unselfish love of other people and of God, an integrity of will rooted in devotion. The account treats these ideals as complementary, although each begins from a different emphasis. Together they express a vision of human life more lucid and generous than ordinary conduct could consistently realize.

That gap between ideal and capacity is not presented as a simple failure of teaching. The nervous system of the First Men, the narrator argues, lacked the vitality and coherence needed to sustain the demands of either ideal. For centuries, the ideals attracted the most precocious individuals without becoming a stable basis for the species’ conduct. Their frustrated pursuit helped foster cynical lassitude, one contributor to the First Men’s decline.

A second spiritual tension arose from admiration of Fate. Greek tragic art, Hebrew worship of divine law, and Indian resignation each offered early encounters with a beauty regarded as alien and transcendent. Yet this reverence conflicted with loyalty to Life and resistance to Death. Few First Men clearly understood the conflict, but the unresolved opposition repeatedly hindered their spiritual development. Their difficulty was therefore not only that they failed to live up to particular virtues; they were also pulled between incompatible ways of valuing existence.

Power, social change, and war

The First Men’s external world changed faster than their primitive nature could accommodate. Increased mastery of physical energy transformed social organization: beings shaped for hunting and fighting were suddenly required to act as citizens, and eventually as citizens of a world-community. They also acquired dangerous powers their minds were poorly equipped to use. The book presents this mismatch between inherited dispositions and rapidly expanding circumstances as a structural pressure, not merely a collection of individual errors.

The European War, known at the time as the War to End War, is the first and least destructive of the world conflicts used to demonstrate the First Men’s inability to control their own nature. Its outbreak combined motives both honorable and disreputable. Differences between France and Germany, rivalry between Germany and England, and brutal gestures by the German government and military command divided the world into opposing camps, though the narrator finds no underlying difference of principle between them. Each side claimed to defend civilization; both committed acts of brutality, while also producing acts of heroism and generosity. In that setting, conduct that might seem merely sane to later observers required unusual self-mastery.

The war also generated a genuine desire for peace and world unity. For a time, the conflict among tribes gave rise to a loyalty wider than tribalism. But the new impulse lacked clear direction and the courage of conviction. The peace that followed therefore embodied both a dawning vision of higher allegiance and the persistence of the tribal loyalties that obstructed it.

The book sets that uncertain aftermath against the consequences of the later Anglo-French War. After the European War, suspicion had persisted through disputes over indemnities and security and through the division of Europe into hostile camps. After the Anglo-French War, extreme disaster temporarily weakened patriotism: France and England cooperated with the League of Nations to reconstruct both countries, while the League investigated and publicized the origins of the conflict. Yet the later war increased the desire for peace even as it made peace less secure, leaving people fearful that they might again succumb to an epidemic of patriotism. The European Confederacy, formed by the European nations other than Russia, pooled armaments and surrendered sovereignty to a common authority. Its unity proved insecure, and Europe’s eventual cohesion rested more on fear of the United States than on common loyalty.

A small accident shows how delicately the First Men’s political course could turn. After a peace message had been sent, a French airman went astray through miscalculation or defective instruments and came to grief in London. The resulting destruction of England and France, the narrator argues, altered the prospects for wider unity: without the accident, the movement begun by the peace message might have gained lasting conviction before a long epidemic of wars brought mental deterioration. The First Men’s history thus makes contingency consequential. Large political outcomes could hinge on a minor failure, because the balance between their impulses toward unity and renewed conflict was so precarious.

Collapse and historical significance

The First World State’s downfall did not lead to a quick recovery. Although human nature immediately before and after the crisis was roughly the same, people who had sustained a world civilization proved unable to construct a new order from its ruins. A vast epidemic of insanity and diminished intelligence, resulting from the use of microbes, left the population unable to arrest the collapse at its earliest stage. Once the epidemic had passed, rebuilding still required sustained collective devotion, a capacity possessed by only a minority. Disillusionment, fatigue, private impulses, and the inflexibility produced by four thousand years of routine deepened the failure; the result was not prompt renewal but a descent into abject savagery.

The first Dark Age lasted roughly one hundred thousand years, within the first tenth of the million years after the fall of the First World State. Only at its close did humanity again pass from savagery through barbarism into civilization. That renaissance lasted about fifteen thousand years, and its final destruction damaged the planet so severely that mind entered a further slumber lasting ten million years, the Second Dark Age. This scale sharpens the book’s judgment of the First Men: their failure was not a brief political setback but the beginning of an eclipse measured in geological time.

Their history ultimately resists both a simple story of progress and a simple story of inevitable ruin. The First Men conceive ideals of truth, love, and unity; they achieve periods of civilization and acts of generosity; and they also repeatedly surrender to tribalism, mental weakness, and destructive power. The distance between what they can imagine and what they can collectively sustain is the defining measure of their place in the chronicle.