Netherworld

“ Light and warmth had this world in plenty, therefore, and with time life had risen on it, crude forms asecnding through the channels of evolutionary change into a myriad different species, of which one species, the nebula-creatures we have seen, was the most intelligent. In time they ruled this strange world, wiping out all other species, and climbed to greater and greater science and power with the passage of time, their existence never suspected by any in the universe outside. ”

“ For the first time since the exultant hope of her life was blasted, Clara shed tears.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE SOUP-KITCHEN
With the first breath of winter there passes a voice half-menacing, half-mournful, through all the barren ways and phantom-haunted refuges of the nether world. Too quickly has vanished the brief season when the sky is clement, when a little food suffices, and the chances of earning that little are more numerous than at other times; this wind that gives utterance to its familiar warning is the vaunt-courier of cold and hunger and solicitude that knows not sleep. ”

“ A haggard, eerie fragment of moon slinked westward. Stars glinted in the flawless chilly blue. The surface of the river was like polished ebony—a dream-path wrought of gloom and gleam. The banks were lines of dusk, except where some lone cottonwood loomed skyward like a giant ghost clothed with a mantle that glistered and darkled in the chill star-sheen.
There was the feel of moving in eternity about it all. The very limitation of the dusk gave the feeling of immensity. There was no sense of motion, yet we moved. The sky seemed as much below as above. We seemed suspended in a hollow globe. ”

“ Shooter’s Gardens and vicinity broke into the most excited feeling. I need not tell you that the nether world will consume—when others supply it—nothing but the very finest quality of food,—that the heads of sheep and bullocks are peculiarly offensive to its stomach,—that a saving effected on sacks of peas outrages its dearest sensibilities. What was the result? Shooter’s Gardens, convinced of the fraud practised upon them, nobly brought back their quarts of soup to the Kitchen and with proud independence of language demanded to have their money returned. ”

“ In the beginning the world appeared to mankind like a fairy tale; everything that lay beyond the circle of familiar experience was a shifting cloudland of the fancy, a playground for all the fabled beings of mythology; but in the farthest distance, towards the west and north, was the region of darkness and mists, where sea, land and sky were merged into a congealed mass—and at the end of all gaped the immeasurable mouth of the abyss, the awful void of space. ”

“ We shall see, as we go on in the legends of the races on both sides of the Atlantic, that they all looked to some central land, east of America and west of Europe, some island of the ocean, where dwelt a godlike race, and where alone, it would seem, the human race was preserved to repeople the earth, while these brutal representatives of the race, the Neanderthal people, were crushed out. ”

“ All the different consequences of these two views will occur to the thinker in an instant.
Upon this basis, then, the Will to Power, Nietzsche builds up a cosmogony which also assumes that species have been evolved; but again, in the processes of that evolution he is at variance with Darwin and all the natural-selectionists.
Nietzsche cannot be persuaded that "mechanical adjustment to ambient conditions," or "adaptation to environment"—both purely passive, meek, and uncreative functions—should be given the importance, as determining factors, which the English and German schools give them. ”

“ Marveled at them, that men can burrow into the earth like that? Then faintly, though very faintly, you understand how I felt standing there, with Nedra pressed close against me, shuddering—the glistening magnesium walls and avenues of subterranean Emporia extending in all directions from the shaft that pierced the city's roof, the lone communication with the surface of the earth. ”

“ And now I saw Norhala raise her head; listen.
“I saw a world, a vast world, Goodwin, marching stately through space. It was no globe—it was a world of many facets, of smooth and polished planes; a huge blue jewel world, dimly luminous; a crystal world cut out from Aether. A geometric thought of the Great Cause, of God, if you will, made material. It was airless, waterless, sunless.
“I seemed to draw closer to it. And then I saw that over every facet patterns were traced; gigantic symmetrical designs; mathematical hieroglyphs. ”

“ Since the moment when the blue sky that looked first so like sky and then so like painted tin had, touched, confessed itself to be a bubble—confessed, too, in the most practical way, by bursting and letting the water into Merland—the children had been carried along by the breathless rush of preparations for the invasion, and the world they were now in had rapidly increased in reality, while their own world, in which till today they had always lived, had been losing reality at exactly the same rate as that by which the new world gained it. ”

“ Lay beneath us as though death had reached out of the unknown to annihilate suddenly all living things upon this alien world, leaving in it only the cold and the silence and the death that enwrapped it now! Neptune—we had flown across the awful void toward it for week upon week, prepared to find within it any strange beings, any alien and terrible form of life, but never had we been prepared to find it without any life whatever—an utterly lifeless world! ”

“ THE FIRE-MIST OF LIFE.
The theory of the formation of worlds from Nebulae is not only endorsed by Sir Robert Ball but he states his belief that the same theory is carried out upon earth in the formation of life according to the plan of Darwin. To quote his words, Darwin “has shown that the evolution of the lifeless earth from nebulae is but the prelude of an organic evolution of still greater interest and complexity.” And further: “Can it be possible that the wondrous and complex phenomena known as life are purely material? ”

“ For, as already explained, temporary hostility to great men may be justified on grounds of economy—they may use up force too quickly, which, if stored, would grow to greater (Will to Power, § 896) .
aa In one passage (Werke, XII, 119, §233) Nietzsche even questions whether the ends of the individual are necessarily those of the species, but here I think he means of a given species. The variant individual may be the principle of the possibility of a higher species, or he may be a species (so to speak) all by himself: humanity may present a succession of species, one rising above another. ”

“ And then a riot of giant vegetation all about it—divinely extravagant, many-colored as fire. And this too flashed out—like the impossible dream of a god too young. And the Great Change came, and the paradox of frost was in the world, stripping life down to the lean essentials till only the sane, capable things might live. And still the Titan stared as in the beginning. And then, men were in the land—gaunt, terrible, wolf-like men, loving and hating. ”

“ Has anyone here ever heard of such a planet having an intelligent life-form able to maintain a continuing existence through such varied environments by radical changes in its physical body?"
A silence ensued, which Nadreck finally broke.
"I know of two such planets. Near Palain there is an extremely variable sun, two of whose planets support life. All of the higher life-forms, the highest of which are quite intelligent, undergo regular and radical changes, not only of form, but of organization." ”

“ Nietzsche conceives that humanity might actually be turned into an organism working to this end—no longer then a disconnected, sprawling mass of atoms (smaller or larger) as at present, but a related, interdependent, organic whole—a whole with an aim, this aim. And so arises his principle of selection, and canon for pity. What will fit into an organism of this sort is worth preserving, what will not is not worth preserving. Equal regard for all material is impossible. ”

“ We speak of the first discovery of the North—but how do we know when the first man arrived in the northern regions of the earth? We know nothing but the very last steps in the [Pg 5] migrations of humanity. What a stretch of time there must have been between the period of the Neanderthal man in Europe and the first Pelasgians, or Iberians, or Celts, that we find there in the neolithic age, in the earliest dawn of history. ”

“ The whole surface of their world they sheathed with smooth, heat-reflecting metal, and then descended in all their hordes into the countless mighty caverns that honeycombed all their great world, taking up their life again in those cool depths, safe from the nebula's heat. ”

“ In verses 15 and 16, we have Nietzsche declaring himself an evolutionist in the broadest sense—that is to say, that he believes in the Development Hypothesis as the description of the process by which species have originated. Now, to understand his position correctly we must show his relationship to the two greatest of modern evolutionists—Darwin and Spencer. As a philosopher, however, Nietzsche does not stand or fall by his objections to the Darwinian or Spencerian cosmogony. ”

“ From these, they produced the Folk, the Gibi, the Tand, and the land-tending Eron.
"Among these, the Folk were eager for wisdom and climbed high. But still the learning of the Ancient Ones remained beyond their grasp.
"During the eons the Ancient Ones dwelt within their protecting wall of haze the outer world changed. Cold came to the north and south; the Land of Sun and the Land of Sea arose to bear the foot of true man. On their mirrors of seeing the Ancient Ones watched man-life spread across the world. They had the power of prolonging life, but still the race was dying. ”

“ I don't know how else than by an area of solid, absolutely unrelieved black you'd represent the Deathlands with its multicolored radioactive dusts and its skimpy freightage of lonely Deathlanders, each bound on his murderous, utterly pointless, but utterly absorbing business—an area where names like Nowhere, It, Anywhere, and the Place are the most natural thing in the world when a few of us decide to try to pad down together for a few nervous months or weeks. ”

“ Each one held in his hand a lethal tube containing the ray, and, as if by command, they took up their stations about their prisoners.
Then, at a signal from their leader, they suddenly doffed their masks.
Nat looked at them in astonishment. He had not known whether these would be Earth denizens or inhabitants of some other planet. But they were Earth men. And they were old.
Men of sixty or seventy, years, with long, gray beards and wrinkled faces, and eyes that stared out from beneath penthouses of shaggy eyebrows. Faces on which were imprinted despair and hopelessness. ”

“ Nectaire took up his flute. Young Maurice lighted a cigarette. The flame burnt brightly for a moment, casting back the sky and its stars into the shadows, and then died out. And Nectaire sang of the flame on his divine flute. The silvery voice soared aloft and sang:
"That flame was a whole universe which fulfilled its destiny in less than a minute. Suns and planets were formed therein. Venus Urania apportioned the orbits of the wandering spheres in those infinite spaces. Beneath the breath of Eros—the first of the gods,—plants, animals, and thoughts sprang into being. ”

“ All the more important, therefore, are the contrasts between the celestial and the nether worlds, as the two realms which include the real destiny of man. At death, man must enter the nether world; to rise from the gloom of this realm of the dead to the heaven and immortality of the celestial gods becomes his longing. Thus, deity beliefs enter into reciprocal relations with soul conceptions. The further stages of this development carry us far beyond the heroic age, and reflect the influence of a diversity of motives. ”

“ There may be as many different kinds of worlds as there can be different arrangements and collocations of the primitive forces. To our world may then succeed a totally different kind of world, just as one totally different may have preceded it. There is no ordering of these things, no controlling design regulating them—it is all chance and accident. [14] But—and here is the real turning-point of Nietzsche's thought—in the course of time, supposing that it goes on indefinitely, the different possible combinations of forces will have all been made. ”

“ Forential was far away in space; every second he was growing farther away in time. I've lost him, Walt thought. So much has happened, so much, so fast, since last I saw him, that I'm changing away from him every minute.
Earthlings aren't so bad. They're—they're not too much different from Lyrians, from ... mutants.
I'm a mutant?
I'm not a Lyrian?
FORENTIAL!
But Forential could not hear him.
I'll have to think for myself, Walt decided. Julia said I couldn't be fooled if I just looked at the facts.
Earthlings aren't like Forential always told us they were. They're pleasant enough. In their way. ”

“ Therefore is it Nature's plan that Ertene be the one planet to gather unto herself the fruit of all knowledge and ultimately lie barren because of the sterility of her culture? Are we to be the sponge for all thought? ”

“ As Nietzsche puts it, the known outer world is born after the effect, of which it is supposed to be the cause. [4] Our bodies themselves are, as we know them, groups of sensations like everything else—what they really are in their intimate nature we have not the slightest idea. b
Nor if we consider the more refined world of science, do we leave the subjective sphere. The world of atoms and their movements, which physicists conceive of as a true world in contrast with the ordinary world of sense-perception, is not essentially different from the ordinary world ”