The Last Men's discovery that they could influence minds in the past overturned the boundary they had drawn between historical observation and action. Their research suggested that certain thoughts in past lives depended on mental acts performed ages later. The past could not be rewritten, but it was not sealed off from the future: in rare cases, events separated by immense spans of time helped determine one another through their eternal existence.

From suspicion to research

The first suspicion arose from obscure biological findings. These suggested that past events did not simply cease to exist, even though they no longer existed in time as present events do. The possibility split a previously harmonious people. One side held that the universe’s formal beauty required everything to vanish; the other insisted that living minds might reach into events in their full pastness.

The dispute threatened to become a crisis of the whole species. The orthodox party regarded the new account as an offense against the order they cherished, broke off telepathic communication with the rebels, and planned their destruction. Violence, the narrator observes, would have amounted to a spiritual disaster that humanity could not have survived. At the last moment, common sense prevailed: the researchers were allowed to continue, and the rest of the race waited for their results.

The investigation became a long, cooperative campaign. It required the sciences, beginning with biology, to be restated in light of the hypothesis, alongside extensive physiological and psychological experiments. Millions of years passed. For some periods the work occupied the race; in others it receded behind different concerns or was set aside. Age after age brought no success, until the research finally yielded a new understanding of the relation between present and past.

What influence could—and could not—do

The breakthrough did not give the Last Men power to alter history. Past events remained what they were, irrevocably. The discovery instead offered an account of how a feature of a past event might depend on a future one: a thought in an earlier mind could be what it was partly because a much later mind would have a particular thought or desire. The two acts were not contemporaneous, but they could be directly related in the sphere of eternal being.

The Last Men had previously entered past minds as spectators. In studying them, historians and psychologists had encountered unexplained irregularities: points where ordinary psychological causes did not fully account for a person’s mental course. Later, some such anomalies were found to correspond with thoughts or desires in the mind of a present-day observer. The investigators concluded that they could communicate with, and contribute to, certain past minds, though not change the events those minds had experienced.

This influence was limited by the past person’s capacity to receive it. A thought with no meaning for a particular individual could not enter that individual’s experience. New ideas and values had to be conveyed through familiar material, arranged so that it acquired a new significance. The Last Men therefore described their power not as the insertion of arbitrary thoughts, but as a way of directing attention toward possibilities already implicit in a person’s experience.

Methods and motives

They identified two methods. With unusually original or powerful minds, they could offer only a vague intuition. The recipient then worked it into a form of their own, different from what the Last Men had intended but potentially influential within that age’s culture. With an ordinary person whose circumstances happened to fit, the Last Men could transmit more detailed ideas; such a person, however, could not transform the material into a comparably potent cultural achievement.

The purpose was to help past people and societies recognize truths or beauties they might otherwise overlook. The Last Men gave two reasons for intervening. Directly entering an earlier mind made them intimately acquainted with it, and that understanding brought love and a desire to help. They also saw humanity’s successive planetary histories as a profoundly beautiful, though imperfect, tragic process. Since that beauty depended in part on their actions at points in the past, they chose to act there.

Their discovery thus made historical knowledge more than the reconstruction of distant events. Earlier peoples had approached their predecessors through fragments and records. In the First Dark Age, the Swastika, once associated with the rebels’ downfall of Gordelpus and the State, was reinterpreted by later generations as the mark of a divine ancestor. Patagonian archaeologists, finding durable metal printing plates in the basement of a shattered pylon in China, reconstructed a lost civilization and tested its knowledge against their own. The Second Men’s discovery of the Siberian Stone Library likewise gave them a vivid historical document, not a storehouse of scientific truth. The Last Men’s direct inspection went further: it brought them into contact with the minds behind the surviving traces.

Failure, legacy, and historical meaning

The first attempts at influence were badly judged. The Last Men attributed some of the confused material that earlier people had blamed on spirits, gods, fiends, or the dead to the gibberish produced by their own inexperienced experiments. Their intervention also affected the present book: a work admirable in its conception emerged from its contemporary writer’s mind in a disordered form. The episode makes the discovery consequential not only for the past being studied, but for the account through which later readers encounter it.

The Last Men’s work with past minds also served as preparation for a demanding task in their own age. They sought to know and love every mind they could enter, including those who might otherwise be excluded from sympathetic understanding. At the same time, their society needed to devote its dwindling energies to producing an artificial human seed and sending it among the stars. That labor was profoundly uncongenial to a people drawn to art, philosophy, and contemplation. Their encounters with the past renewed their resolve: by returning to earlier struggles, they could recover a zeal for life while retaining their acceptance of their own fate.

The discovery therefore joins an apparent paradox. The past is fixed, yet minds in the present can be part of what some past experiences eternally are. Historical inquiry becomes a form of participation rather than revision, motivated both by care for particular people and by a sense of humanity’s larger, tragic beauty.