their bloodthirsty eyes
in death, their spirits are wafted to our planet, there to take on new
garments of flesh. The influx of brutal souls is perennial. This
explains why, Churches and missionary effort notwithstanding, we have
always savages, cannibals, and barbarians (and Prussian militarists?)
with us. But there is comfort in the other side of the picture. When we
in our turn have learnt all the lessons of this miserable globe of
folly, when we have mastered all the virtues and shed all the vices,
when we long to be free from the trammels of sense and appetite and
sickness and ambition, we are transferred to Mercury. Mercury is a
highly evolved planet, a spiritualized existence, free from the
obsessions of sex and greed, an abode of love and freedom.

Oh, how I sigh for Mercury!

Supposing this sinful earth is only a school for reformed Martians;
supposing human nature and history always repeat themselves, and the end
is as the beginning and the beginning as the end? The first steps in
education accomplished, the scholars would be removed to better
premises, and to a more advanced course of instruction. But the old
school would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There
would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the
same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not
seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to brood
over all physical existence. There is no stability even in solar
systems. Even we puny creatures can divine something of their birth and
death. Out of whirling nebulae suns and planets are born; souls slowly
evolve on worlds which were once balls of fire. There are endless
diversity and specialization, myriads of creatures rise out of the
furnace of life. Some gain ascendancy and lay claim to mental supremacy,
to science and religion and the overlordship of the universe. I am sure
Mars, Mercury, and Tellus are equally prone to this weakness. One
day--in the uncountably many of solar mornings--there is a collision, a
breaking up of all the old forms through contact with some mysterious
roving mass of burning matter. The planets with their kings and prophets
disappear in fire and gas, The perturbation in the vast Cosmos of Change
is probably not greater than that caused by the fall of an old and
rotten tree before the cleansing winds of spring.

All mankind clings to the hope that something escapes destruction and
rises