The Second Human's Mental Decline

The Second Men’s spiritual malaise was a species-wide crisis in which a refined civilization could neither make meaning from its repeated disasters nor simply set that effort aside. Their defining failure was not an absence of culture or intelligence, but the inability to experience as beautiful the racial tragedy they had resolved to accept as part of a greater order. That impasse drained pleasure from private life and weakened public society; when a Martian attack finally united them, the recovery of collective purpose proved powerful, but the preceding decline had been profound.

A recovery shadowed by doubt

After immense periods of calamity, the Second Men entered an interval of peace and relative prosperity. Their lives again held room for skilled work, personal relationships, music, literature, visual art, intellectual inquiry, and religious experience. Their culture and personalities grew subtle and rich, and society approached a degree of perfection within the limits of its territory and material resources. Yet beneath that renewal, the species felt itself to be deteriorating. It proposed once more to remake human nature on a higher plane, but no longer possessed the courage and self-respect to undertake the work. The aspiration persisted in words while the effort itself stalled: generations followed generations, and human life retained its forms without advancing.

This was more than a generalized loss of confidence. The account describes a spiritual effort that had exceeded the Second Men’s capacity. They had attempted to regard their racial tragedy as beautiful and had failed to achieve that experience. Their nobility made the failure harder to evade: they could not simply return to ordinary life with their former zest, but could not complete the spiritual transformation that might have justified their suffering. Their malaise lay in that suspended condition, between an old way of living they could no longer inhabit wholeheartedly and a higher understanding they could not reach.

The unresolved meaning of tragedy

The crisis had roots in an inherited interpretation of disaster. During the earliest Martian raids, humanity’s spiritual leaders taught that people must struggle to save civilization while also learning to endure and admire even its sternest outcomes. The Second Men initially seemed to make that teaching real. Their literature gave form to the experience and appeared to deepen it in people’s hearts. But as disasters recurred across centuries, later generations began to suspect that their forebears had persuaded themselves they had attained an experience that had never actually occurred.

The doubt opened two incompatible possibilities. The Second Men might be too limited to perceive an ultimate excellence in the course of events, despite having intellectual grounds to believe such excellence existed. Or the human race might have deceived itself, and cosmic events might possess no significance at all. Their descendants could not settle the question by appealing to inherited conviction: they had to confront the distance between believing in a cosmic beauty and actually experiencing it. Even after the Martian colony had been established and destroyed three times by the orthodox race on Mars, this religious problem remained the species’ central preoccupation. The repeated catastrophes did not resolve the question; they made the old assurance increasingly difficult to trust.

From inward crisis to social disorder

The dilemma became especially destructive because it coincided with declining physical vitality. The Second Men had lost the strength needed to accept the limits of their spiritual understanding and patiently build what remained possible. As the crisis deepened, the pursuits that had sustained their prosperous culture lost their appeal: personal relationships, communal enterprise, art, and intellectual research no longer provided their former satisfaction. The impairment spread across ordinary life, taking pleasure from bodily intimacy, food, and sunbathing as well as from more overtly intellectual or religious activity. The species was so closely integrated, the narrative argues, that disorder in its highest spiritual function damaged other capacities rather than remaining confined to belief.

A slight general decline in physique, inherited from ages of war, also brought back severe brain disorders familiar from earlier human history. Fear of renewed racial insanity further disturbed judgment. Desire and conduct became alarming to the Second Men themselves; betrayals of the community and predatory raids between local groups emerged where they had previously been almost unknown. Nations and nationalist fears returned. These developments were not presented as a separate political failure that happened to accompany the malaise: they were part of the same deterioration, in which spiritual exhaustion, vulnerability to mental disorder, and social disintegration reinforced one another.

The attack and its temporary reversal

The Martian colonists observed humanity’s disorganization and prepared a major offensive at the instigation of the home planet. The timing intensified the contrast. The colony was passing through a phase of enlightenment, during which some individuals were considering harmony with humanity rather than war; the Martian public mind rejected this prospect as treason and sought to overwhelm it with a new crusade. Human disunity made the attack opportune.

The first attack abruptly changed the Second Men’s condition. Within weeks, national governments surrendered their sovereignty to a central authority, and the disorder, corruption, and dissolute conduct that had become customary ceased. Devotion to the social cause returned across the species, accompanied by brotherliness and a jocular form of heroism despite the horrors of war. The episode shows that the malaise was not an unchangeable absence of collective feeling: an external threat could restore unity and redirect the population toward shared action. But this sudden mobilization answers a different question from the spiritual one that had poisoned the Second Men. It demonstrates the force of renewed social purpose, not that they had at last experienced the cosmic beauty they had sought in tragedy. The decline’s decisive significance remains this separation between outward capacity for collective devotion and inward inability to make suffering meaningful.