interest never flags, and we look hopefully
for some good fortune, or fearfully lest our own faces be shown us as
figuring in something terrible. When the scene is past we think we know
it, though there is so much to see, and so little time to see it, that
our conceit of knowledge as regards the past is for the most part poorly
founded; neither do we care about it greatly, save in so far as it may
affect the future, wherein our interest mainly lies.

The Erewhonians say it was by chance only that the earth and stars and
all the heavenly worlds began to roll from east to west, and not from
west to east, and in like manner they say it is by chance that man is
drawn through life with his face to the past instead of to the future.
For the future is there as much as the past, only that we may not see it.
Is it not in the loins of the past, and must not the past alter before
the future can do so?

Sometimes, again, they say that there was a race of men tried upon the
earth once, who knew the future better than the past, but that they died
in a twelvemonth from the misery which their knowledge caused them; and
if any were to be born too prescient now, he would be culled out by
natural selection, before he had time to transmit so peace-destroying a
faculty to his descendants.

Strange fate for man! He must perish if he get that, which he must
perish if he strive not after. If he strive not after it he is no better
than the brutes, if he get it he is more miserable than the devils.

Having waded through many chapters like the above, I came at last to the
unborn themselves, and found that they were held to be souls pure and
simple, having no actual bodies, but living in a sort of gaseous yet more
or less anthropomorphic existence, like that of a ghost; they have thus
neither flesh nor blood nor warmth. Nevertheless they are supposed to
have local habitations and cities wherein they dwell, though these are as
unsubstantial as their inhabitants; they are even thought to eat and
drink some thin ambrosial sustenance, and generally to be capable of
doing whatever mankind can do, only after a visionary ghostly fashion as
in a dream. On the other hand, as long as they remain where they are
they never die--the only form of death in the unborn world being the
leaving it for our own. They are believed to be extremely numerous, far
more so than mankind. They arrive from unknown planets, full grown, in
large batches at a time; but