Racial mentality

Racial mentality is the rarest and most far-reaching form of consciousness described among the Last Men: an individual passes beyond personal and group experience to become, for a time, the mind of the entire race. It is not simply communication on a planetary scale. The whole race becomes a single perceiving self, whose enlarged vision leaves an obscure but lasting impression on individual life and directs the society’s common purpose.

From Group Experience to a Racial Self

The experience arises from capacities the Last Men have developed through both good fortune and research directed by Group-minds. Individuals can communicate telepathically across the planet, and the whole race may listen while one person addresses it; racial mentality is categorically different. The planetary system of radiation, embracing the race’s million million brains, becomes the physical basis of a racial self. The individual discovers that this self is embodied in everyone’s body, rather than merely receiving messages from distant people.

The scale of perception changes accordingly. The racial self apprehends all bodily contacts, enfolds the world through the feet of its people, and sees through all eyes at once. The planet’s many visual fields become a continuous, variegated whole. Group-minds, which stand above individual experience, are themselves surpassed: the racial self regards them with a shifting mixture of sympathy, reverence, detachment, and fascination. It can regard humanity’s activity as an artist regards material to be shaped, while also watching the struggles of individuals and groups from above.

Planetary and Temporal Perception

Racial mentality also transforms the apprehension of space. It combines the views available from different bodies and observatories into a single astronomical perspective. From both limbs of Neptune’s orbit, the racial self perceives the planets and the sun stereoscopically. Its vision extends beyond the planetary scene: by observing the galaxy from successive points along Neptune’s wide orbit, it perceives some constellations in three dimensions, and recent instruments make the whole galaxy appear stereoscopic. The great nebulae and remote universes, however, remain flat marks in the sky. Even this immense human consciousness encounters its limits, and the distant universe makes its minuteness and impotence evident.

Time, too, becomes a different kind of space for experience. Ordinary individuals can hold a duration comparable to the old terrestrial day within a single present and distinguish rapid events within it. In racial mentality, the span of the present expands to include the whole period since the oldest living individuals were born; the species’ entire past appears as personal memory stretching back into infancy. At the same time, the racial self can distinguish successive light-vibrations. Its temporal enlargement is therefore not merely a slower or vaguer awareness: it combines an immense span with fine discrimination.

That capacity contains a paradox the Last Men cannot resolve after returning to ordinary consciousness. The race’s first experience of racial mentality lasted only for the time Neptune’s moon took to complete one circuit, yet within that brief existence the racial self apprehended the species’ preceding history as present. The experience thus included a vast past during which the racial self itself had not existed. The Last Men retain the perplexity of this temporal perspective, but not the means to explain it.

Vision, Beauty, and Horror

The philosophical content of racial mentality exceeds what an isolated person or even a Group-mind can communicate. It illuminates the nature of space and time, mind and its objects, cosmical striving, and cosmical perfection; once the Last Men have declined from the racial state, they cannot clearly recall the insight itself. What remains is the impression that the experience possessed extreme subtlety and beauty, accompanied by an equally profound sense of horror.

In racial mentality, the Last Men seem to have looked into an abyss of evil that their ordinary selves cannot conceive and could not endure to contemplate directly. Yet they also remember, obscurely but with conviction, that this horror could be accepted as an organic part of the cosmos. Human striving and individual desire, along with both defeat and temporary triumph, were perceived as contributing to an excellence greater than any of them alone. The vision does not erase tragedy; it apprehends tragedy and achievement within a larger order, and its beauty unsettles the ordinary distinction between loyalty to human striving and detached contemplation of its outcome.

The Racial Purpose and Social Order

Racial mentality has consequences beyond the rare moments in which it is attained. The Last Men cannot recover its complete vision as individuals, but its obscure memory remains powerful enough to shape their conduct and collective policies. Their society is governed by a single racial purpose, religious in character, which presides in every individual mind. That purpose does not require the suppression of private fulfilment: physical and mental individual flourishing is instead a condition of its realization.

The resulting social order is described as living in accord without armies or a police force, while customs rather than coercive laws organize its life. Social proposals are put before the whole population in telepathic conference. The Last Men’s account connects this arrangement to the influence of group and racial mentality: the enlarged forms of consciousness affect individual minds and therefore the society those individuals sustain. The rare racial vision cannot be reproduced at will or set out fully in ordinary language, but its afterimage becomes an enduring political and ethical force.