Soul of All

The Soul of All names the hoped-for awakening in which one spirit gathers all spirits across time, knows all things together, and finds them worthy of admiration. For the Last Men, it is not an established fact but the most generous possibility their philosophy can conceive: a future fulfilment that might redeem even lives extinguished without understanding or consolation. Their account keeps the question unresolved, making the Soul of All both a cosmic ideal and a measure of what remains uncertain about existence.

The universal awakening

The Last Men can explore the past wherever they encounter intelligible minds, but they cannot enter the future. They therefore cannot know whether a spirit will ever awaken to gather all spirits into itself, draw out the full beauty of the stars, and know and admire everything together. The limits of their knowledge are essential to the idea: the Soul of All is not a discovery they report, but a possibility they cannot verify.

They nevertheless reason that if this end is achieved at any point in the far future, it is genuinely achieved now as well, because whatever occurs has eternal being. Such an awakening would belong to spirits not wholly unlike themselves, though infinitely greater, and would have to arise in the far future. If no future spirit achieves it before dying, the cosmos may still be beautiful, but it would not be perfect. The expression thus holds open two sharply different accounts of reality: an eternal completion that includes every spirit, or a beautiful universe in which many lives remain unredeemed.

The tragedy the idea would answer

The Last Men set their own approaching extinction against the suffering of beings who never shared their vision of cosmic beauty. They recall lowly creatures whose lives were largely dreamlike, and intelligent beings across many worlds who struggled, tasted brief delights, endured pain and death, and were finally overcome by indifferent fate. Their reckoning includes the Martians, the native Venerians imprisoned in their ocean and killed for humanity’s sake, and the many human species that came before them. For most beings before the Last Men’s age, thwarting outweighed fulfilment; many could not even imagine the consolation they had missed.

The Sixteenth Men, oppressed by this vast horror, undertook what seemed a forlorn crusade to rescue the tragic past. The Last Men see a possible metaphysical basis for that undertaking: if the cosmic ideal is ever realized, the awakened Soul of All will embrace every spirit throughout the whole circuit of time. Each spirit, even the least, would then seem to have awakened into that consciousness, knowing all things and rejoicing in them. The vision could give every martyred spirit eternal beatitude, though that blessing would remain unknown to the spirit in its ordinary, temporal life. But the Last Men cannot establish that this is what happens. If their hope is false, the martyred remain only martyred, never blessed.

History, memory, and filial understanding

The idea belongs to a civilization that treats knowledge of the past as an ethical undertaking, not merely as historical recovery. The Last Men describe their effort to know and love every past mind they can enter as an act of filial piety. They believe that such understanding creates a new form of love and thereby enhances the cosmos; none of the minds they can reach, not even the worst, is to be excluded from that work of comprehension and admiration.

Earlier encounters with human history show how difficult such understanding is. The Patagonians’ archaeological discoveries overturned their belief that they were pioneers of the mind: ancient metal plates revealed a civilization vastly greater than their own, but research also showed that the earlier culture had been brilliant and profoundly irrational. The Second Men, after finding the damaged tablets of the Siberian Stone Library, valued them chiefly as a historical record of an earlier species’ thought, rather than as a source of scientific or philosophical truth. The Last Men’s project extends beyond recovering records or correcting inherited accounts. Their ambition is to approach past minds with enough understanding to include them in a shared act of regard.

Hope without certainty

The Soul of All does not erase the Last Men’s awareness of suffering, nor does it settle whether the universe is ultimately perfect. Their confidence concerns the possibility’s meaning, not its proof. If the awakening occurs, even briefly, the Last Men reason that its eternal being would outlast the stellar decay that ends its temporal appearance; if it never occurs, the suffering of past beings remains without that final consolation.

That unresolved alternative shapes the Last Men’s conduct. Though reconciled to their own fate, they must turn from contemplation to the arduous work of making artificial human seeds and projecting them among the stars. They also return to the past for moral strength, seeking to revive the zeal needed to defend life against death. The Soul of All therefore links intimate attention to forgotten minds with a future beyond their knowledge: it is at once an ideal of universal inclusion and a hope whose truth the Last Men cannot see.